The purpose of this qualitative study was to consider "friendsickness" as experienced by 96 entering college students. As defined here, "friendsickness" is a challenge new students experience when they leave their established network of friends and begin college. Journal entries written by new students in first-year seminars were examined and…

In response to demographic changes among entering college students, more and more colleges are offering freshman orientation courses that have come to be known as "College 101." At Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, a course called COL 101 was begun in 1985. A survey of teachers of the course investigated speech or oral…

Students often arrive at universities ill-prepared for the reflective practice needed to derive maximum benefits from a Freshman Seminar. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, portfolio projects are semester-long assignments in which the portfolio serves as a capstone activity to help freshmen more thoroughly analyze their first year…

The IowaLink Program at the University of Iowa is a two-semester, academic support program for recruited students. The program provides an extended academic transition between high school and college for students who have demonstrated the potential to succeed at Iowa but who do not meet standards for regular admission. One of the features of the…

Suggests stressing the humanistic dimensions of science as a way to bridge the gap between sciences and the humanities. Provides a rationale for focusing on the humanistic side of science and briefly describes a freshman seminar at Macalester College (St. Paul, Minn.) conducted by science, social science, and humanities faculty. (JN)

Bowling Green State University, Ohio, carried out a study of learning communities and first-year programs to determine their success in facilitating student success, increasing engagement, and promoting connections. Findings from 10 learning communities show the overall success of these programs and provide favorable cost estimates. (SLD)

California Lutheran University's seven-week freshman seminar focuses on building relationships and helping students make decisions about their college and occupational careers. Issues arising in the course's evolution include the role of peer advisors, major vs. non-major advising, maintaining institution-wide support, and credit and academic…

This paper suggests areas that need to be made implicit in developing the successful freshman seminar course including knowledge domains, acculturation, and metacognition. Literature on critical thinking, metacognition, and freshman seminars is brought together. (Author/MLW)

This study assessed the impact of a first-year experience course on the academic performance, persistence, and graduation rates of first-semester college students enrolled at a public research university in fall 1998. Two groups of first-year college students were matched according to their gender, race, SAT score, high school GPA, and intended…

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) offers student workshops that range from Cool New Web Stuff (what is on the web that can help make research or just plain life easier) and How To Use Google Scholar. These workshops are brilliant fodder for podcasting. In fact, the initial idea for its podcast project came from a student plagiarism…

First-year students taking developmental courses need the kind of guidance a freshman seminar can provide when the advice is directly relevant to their progress. An alternative to assigning a heterogeneous group of students to an academic advisor is to offer a course which enriches the key elements of a freshman seminar while applying the standard…

One version of a first year seminar in rhetoric examines the President Kennedy assassination controversy as seen by several writers in a rhetorical framework that stresses the difference, particularly in regard to the writers' approaches to truth, in intellectual and imaginative discourses. The assignments, three major writing projects, introduce…

A longitudinal study of the retention and academic performance of college freshmen taking freshman seminars found that participating students with higher Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores were significantly less likely to leave college than nonparticipating controls, and participating students with lower SAT scores showed slightly better…

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)

This article draws on historical and philosophical lenses and interviews with students to question some fundamental tenets underlying the practice of freshman learning communities (FLCs): that they develop community and improve students' learning experiences. The article brings to the discourse of FLCs some critical questions regarding their value…