This case study involves investigation of freshman students' abilities to engage in the pursuit and appreciation of complex thinking through their study of comedy and laughter in a Freshman Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. We offer an analysis of students' reflections on their confrontation with complexity as they attempt to…

This paper is concerned with teacher collaboration in Higher Education. Specifically, it focuses on how a "community of practice" emerged and developed during the process of enhancing first year transition for pre-service teachers. It is written from the perspective of five teacher educators and is situated within the literature of the…

For more than 25 years, educators have developed and institutionalized efforts to help first-year students succeed. This monograph collects case studies from 22 institutions that have created programs and initiatives to support their first-year students. The programs range from encouraging civic engagement and academic achievements to…

Enhancing critical thinking skills for undergraduate students is important across the curriculum and between disciplines. We report on a method of improving critical thinking skills, which was studied through an Ethics and Science First-Year Seminar course. We used full cycle assessment over a three-year period to assess students' development and…

A group of five graduate students and a faculty mentor used the cultural popularity of forensics to develop a first-year undergraduate seminar. This course fulfilled two main objectives: First, the graduate student instructors developed professionally through a two-year process of creating, instructing, and revising a course. Second, a variety of…

In 2000, Rutgers College launched a First-Year Interest Group Seminar (FIGS) program that offers entering new students an opportunity to engage in conversations on topics of mutual interest (health and medicine, business, or law) as well as learn about how to navigate a large Research-I institution. Each student involved in FIGS enrolls in a…

A first-year seminar general education course provides a good opportunity to search for mathematical topics associated with the popular culture represented in the course's required films and readings. We discuss mathematical connections to several books, including "Life of Pi" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," and to the…

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) is increasingly offering more Web-based, online orientation courses to students. Since the fall semester of 1999, the community college campuses throughout the VCCS have offered over 100 sections of online orientation courses. However, no assessment data or research for these courses or students exists.…

Examined the effects on teaching techniques of faculty (n=68) at the University of South Carolina who taught a freshman seminar after completing a training workshop. Many faculty reported that they had transferred the new teaching techniques learned in preparation for the freshman seminar to their discipline-based courses. These included lecturing…

Faculty and administrators at many research-intensive institutions are concerned about effectively introducing students to the research culture that sets research institutions apart from technical and junior colleges. The first-year seminar with academic content might accomplish this objective because it can be focused on students' own research…

Although the case teaching method is most prominent in graduate schools, the technique is well suited to freshman seminar courses that seek to promote student development and self-discovery. Discusses how cases have been developed and integrated into Freshman Seminar 101, a required one-credit course at a private liberal arts college. (JPS)

Asserts that the use of journals in a service-learning course is a way to motivate first-year students to be more introspective and reflective and to document changes they undergo during their experience. Finds that students will reflect on how service-learning affects their evolving identities and their clarification of career goals. (Contains 14…

Acknowledging that in this age of technology students need to learn how to integrate the values of both the humanities and science/technology, this paper describes a special nonclassroom, noncredit program to that end for college freshman honors students at the University of Evansville (Indiana). Following an introduction, the paper discusses the…

Traditional views of critical thinking instruction focus on teaching students to develop skeptical responses to the texts they read. Genuinely powerful and generative forms of critical thinking, however, require students to read creatively as well. To balance the rigor of analysis and exorbitance of creativity, a freshman honors seminar was…

This article examines issues encountered over a two-year period by a faculty librarian at the Penn State University Libraries while developing and delivering course-related library instruction employing problem-based learning (PBL) in the First-Year Seminar (FYS) of the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). The process of…