Purpose: The transition to college presents significant challenges for many students as they navigate new academic and social experiences. In the USA, 30% of first-year students drop out before their second year. Research indicates that mentoring programs help students achieve social integration and likely have a positive effect on their…

The study examined the effect of birth order differences on adjustment among first year undergraduate students in one selected university in Kenya. A cross-sectional survey research design was adopted. The sample size comprised 213 first year students selected using both stratified and simple random sampling techniques. The adjustment…

College adjustment is particularly challenging for students from rural Appalachia, causing rural students to be more likely than their suburban and urban peers to withdraw from college. However, little is known about rural Appalachian college students' adjustment. We explored 18 rural Appalachian students' college adjustment experiences and…

Strands in the extant literature show many students graduate from high school illprepared to be successful in the postsecondary environment. The purpose of this study is to better understand best practices for achieving first-year student success within the realm of higher education. First-year college students may experience challenges in…

Peer mentoring has shown beneficial effects in facilitating academic and social integration among first-year students in higher education. Previous research is, however, limited by the exclusion of a comparison group, to examine whether the integration process still occurs among non-mentored students, independently of peer mentoring. By using…

Interest in college students' adjustment is rising along with the expansion of the well-being trend. In particular, when individuals first enter a university, they are under stress and experience various challenges due to the new environment and tasks. While participating in and spectating sports provide numerous benefits at individual,…

Short-term social integration at the initial stage is particularly important for first-year college students and often plays a key factor in determining newcomers' subsequent socialization outcomes. Recent years have witnessed the growing popularization and impacts of online social integration (OnSI) among college students. Drawing on dominant…

As students transition from high school to university, they must navigate new academic learning environments, develop new social networks, manage multiple new responsibilities, explore and regulate independence, and deal with the stressors that they will encounter. Successful transitioning to university often involves sources of support as well as…

Previous research has concentrated on psychological resilience as a holistic structure and has found that resilience positively affects college adjustment. However, it is suggested by existing literature that college students' resilience is a multidimensional construct. Furthermore, there is limited understanding regarding the categorizations of…

Outdoor orientation programs (OOPs) use wilderness or adventure experiences as a transition of incoming first-year students to college and university settings. We explored resilience and flourishing outcomes from two OOP trips in Virginia and North Carolina using the Brief Resilience Scale, the Mental Health Continuum Short Form, and a thematic…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to discover, from the First-Year Experience student perspective, how the course might be improved to better meet their needs in the post-pandemic environment. The transitional experiences of first-year college students and best practices for the First-Year Experience course curriculum have…

The authors explored the influence of family background and students' perceived socioeconomic status with minoritized students' acculturation and transition experiences during their first-year, first-time enrollment at a predominantly White institution in the southeastern United States. Narrative interviews and "a priori" codes from the…

Engaging with interdisciplinary learning during higher education (HE) study can provide students with skills and modes of thinking informed by multiple worldviews. Opportunities for interdisciplinary learning in the English HE system are limited; associated primarily with postgraduate study or later undergraduate stages. This paper reports on an…

Understanding the secondary--tertiary transition is not only an educational matter, but also an inclusion and equality matter as mathematics qualifications lead to better employment and better earning for students. Research on what causes the crisis associated to this transition has so far focused on the impact of cognitive and epistemological…

Research has demonstrated consistently that personality and perceived stress, independently, are essential factors for university adjustment among university freshmen; however, little is known about the associations between personality, perceived stress, and adjustment together. Our primary goal was to explore the predictive utility of perceived…