First-year experience programs hope to help increase retention and graduation rates by providing students' academic and social foundations during their first semester in college. The academic and social curriculums embedded in first-year experience programs strive to have a positive impact on improving students' self-esteem and retention attitude.…

Adult learners have different needs than traditional college-aged students. We present the first-year results of a targeted learning community for high-achieving, low-income engineering and engineering technology adult students. Students in this project received academic support and mentorship to prepare them for entering the engineering…

This research presents a model for implementing and assessing a service-learning first-year seminar course and living community. The study investigated students' attitudes and perceived benefits of the three aspects of their first-year program experience - community service participation, servant-leadership development, and living community…

Collaborative worldbuilding is an ideal digital writing project for promoting critical thinking about contemporary issues, developing and applying disciplinary expertise writing transfer, and building digital literacies. In the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic where the student experience was characterised by isolation, collaborative…

University Honors programming in the United States is interdisciplinary and collaborative; from First Year Seminars to capstone research projects for upperclassmen, students embrace multidisciplinary learning and research. This approach, however, does not always translate into an incorporation of diverse perspectives of multiple faculty members in…

How can universities ensure that the first-year learning experiences are purposeful, personal, and transformative? This study explores challenges post-secondary institutions face in the ever-changing landscape of first-year teaching and learning. It spanned 18 months and included surveys, reflections, and an environmental scan of 92 first-year…

Writing in the Disciplines curricula can both challenge and reinforce assumptions that writing is a general skill that students will already have learned prior to doing the specialized writing in their chosen field of study. Rhetorical genre studies, however, tends to emphasize the situated nature of writing expertise, and thus supports the…

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the retention of African American students at predominately White colleges and universities continues to be problematic. Although many of these institutions have implemented retention programs for African American students, few have incorporated a comprehensive program that utilizes multi-program…

This paper details the First-Year Career Development Program (First-Year Program)--a component of a comprehensive multi-year program designed to guide business students through self-assessment and the selection of an appropriate business major and ultimately to prepare them to secure professional career positions. The First-Year Program is…

This study serves as the preliminary analyses of a pilot study of community college students who persisted through their remedial classes and their programs of study and had attained the associate degree at a multicultural community college. This study is informed by Tinto's academic integration model, Astin's social involvement model and Freire's…

Academically oriented first-year seminars can be good venues for teaching many of the concepts important to WAC programs, including extended engagement with a research topic and situated writing. A qualitative study of a first-year seminar program at the University of Calgary highlights faculty members' and students' responses.