Higher education is challenged by workforce needs to transform its outcomes from "knowledge-based" to "competency-based" outcomes. High-impact educational practices, commonly referred to as HIPs, provide, among other benefits, efficacious development of workforce-ready specific competencies. Strategic implementation of HIPs has…

The first-year seminar Why Are We Here? Student Culture and the Problem of College (WAWH) helps high-achieving students become motivated agents in their education by changing attitudes toward themselves, college, and their roles as students. The author presents the intentional design, execution, analysis, and results of the WAWH seminar, a…

High-impact practices (HIPs) have been shown to be effective in helping first-year students successfully transition into college. However, since most of the research on HIPs has been done in small liberal arts settings, little is known about the efficacy and implementation practices of HIPs in large, public, primarily nonresidential institutions,…

The study aims to empirically test the relationship between types of campus adaptations across academic years of engineering undergraduate B. Tech students pursuing a four-year study at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT's) and National Institute of Technology (NIT's) in India. The Multivariate Analysis of Variance (Manova) test was run with SPSS…

Success in college is topic that is continually debated and contested, specifically, with respect to identifying how it is defined, operationalized, and fostered. The first-year experience is a phrase used to describe the intricacies and associated issues of being a first-year student in college. This study addressed the limited research and…

We used quantitative data from the National Study of LGBTQ Student Success to investigate if participation in high-impact educational practices influenced lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer (LGBQ+) students' academic development. We also examined if these effects are mediated by perceptions of the campus environment. Our findings suggested that…

This study examined the relationship between 10 high-impact practices and graduation rates at four-year public colleges and universities in the United States. The Association of American Colleges and Universities defined high-impact practices as especially effective for student learning, engagement, and career preparation in the 21st century.…

The success of the first-year experience (FYE) course hangs on the effectiveness of the individual faculty members who are given the task of educating first-year students in a particularly important developmental period. This article applies a flipped classroom strategy for kickstarting meaningful classroom discussion in Mathematics Education to…

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand transfer students' experiences of their transition to a private four-year college in Brooklyn, New York, one with an approximate enrollment of 1100 undergraduates. Of particular focus are the students' experience of a Transfer Seminar required of transfer students in their first semester…

This chapter draws from national data to explore unique attributes of first-year seminars in community college contexts as well as high-impact practices that are often connected to them. Findings point to areas of opportunity for practice and directions for future research to better understand how community colleges can be poised to meet the…

This article reports on a qualitative study that explored the learning outcomes from an innovative instructional method, visual narratives, used in a first-year seminar. Fifty-three students enrolled in a mandatory first semester student success course were instructed to use visual images to tell the story of the first-year experience. Data…

This quantitative study examined first-time-in-college students' (FTIC) perceptions of a first- year-experience program, "Transition Course". The study used survey methodological techniques to examine variables and answer research questions. The theoretical frameworks for this study were based on the conceptualization of student success:…

This study examines the impact of culturally responsive pedagogy in an introduction to university course developed specifically for Aboriginal Access students. The pedagogy has been conceptualized to reflect interconnectivity in a nested system, where all facets of learning link with each other on emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical levels.…

Writing intensive first-year seminars are well situated within the curriculum to teach about issues like cheating and plagiarism. Although most research on academic integrity focuses on how--and how much--students cheat, we take a different approach. We assess whether participation in writing intensive first-year seminars produces measurable…

Writing, a critical pedagogical tool, cultivates student learning and fosters deeper understanding of the material. When frequent, low-stakes (informal) writing activities help students write more freely, engage with the material and thus become active learners. Looking at students who are at opposite ends of a community college spectrum, this…