PACE Library Connection: Sep 2018 - First-Year Experience

For some time now the terms ‘transition to university’ and ‘first-year experience’ have been at the centre of discussion and discourse at, and about, Australian universities. For those university administrators, researchers and teachers involved, this focus has been framed by a number of interlinked factors ranging from social justice concerns to the hard economic realities confronting the contemporary corporatising university. This book seeks to reconceptualise the ‘first-year experience’ and interrogate taken-for-granted understandings of what ‘the university’ is, and consider what universities might yet become.

The new U.S. national standards movement has pushed us at “warp speed” from Common Core curriculum standards to updated assessments for college readiness, but we have not fully examined what it means to be college ready. Why is it that roughly half of all high school students need remedial classes before being considered ready for college-level work? Current public policies aim to eliminate the need for remedial college classes by ratcheting up instruction and expectations at the K-12 level, but if we do not find out what these students are missing, how can we expect to be successful? For higher education scholars and practitioners and those generally interested in the future of college, this book helps tell a novel story about the transition to college, from the perspective of an experienced college professor.

First-year seminars have been widely hailed as a high-impact educational practice, leading to improved academic performance, increased retention, and achievement of critical 21st Century learning outcomes. While the first-year seminar tends to be narrowly defined in the literature, national explorations of course structure and administration underscore the diversity of these curricular initiatives across and within individual campuses. What then are the common denominators among these highly variable courses that contribute to their educational effectiveness? This collection of case studies--representing a wide variety of institutional and seminar types--addresses this question. Using Kuh and O'Donnell's eight conditions of effective educational initiatives as a framework, authors describe the structure, pedagogy, and assessment strategies that lead to high-quality seminars. Introductory and concluding essays examine the structural conditions that are likely to support educational effectiveness in the seminar and describe the most commonly reported conditions across all cases. What Makes the First-Year Seminar High Impact?offers abundant models for ensuring the delivery of a high-quality educational experience to entering students.