This study draws on complete friendship network data on two first-year biological sciences cohorts at a selective university in the United States to investigate how and to what extent allocating students to curricular groups and grading their performance in class shape (1) processes of friend selection at the dyadic level and (2) friendship…

Objective: This article tests the substance use behaviors of college students before and during COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: In-depth assessment and nightly survey data was used from a longitudinal study (n = 675) which examined student substance use during the 2019-2020 academic year, both before and during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

This study discusses the adaptation transformation of minority students, especially those from Eastern Indonesia, in transitioning to higher education in their first year of study. It involves 60 minority students from various faculties in eight focus group discussion groups and is followed up with in-depth interviews with three minority students.…

This article explores student equity in higher education through the lens of academic language and learning (ALL) and argues that ALL remains a significant barrier to participation and success for students from equity backgrounds. This article aims to provide a critical, equity-focused examination of the discourses evident in the literature that…

This paper presents a case study on the development and implementation of an online pre-arrival resource at the University of Manchester, aimed at enhancing the sense of belonging among first-year undergraduate offer holders. The resource leverages student-staff co-creation, inclusive pedagogy and student-led content to support new students'…

The interplay between mental health and academic behaviours has been understudied. This study examined the relationship between foundational academic behaviours (e.g., attending class and meeting assignment deadlines), student mental health and well-being, and academic performance. Participants consisted of 229 students (52.6% female) who…

The rapid development of Generative AI (GenAI) tools presents challenges for their ethical and responsible use. This pilot study examines student learning agreements as a governance tool for GenAI use in a first-year engineering course. These agreements included ethical and social considerations that students accepted if they chose to use GenAI.…

Concept maps are widely used across disciplines as a graphical tool for organizing and representing knowledge. While the effectiveness of concept maps as a learning tool to organize subject knowledge is well-documented in the literature, there is scant research on concept maps as a visual tool to augment L2 learners' multimodal communication…

We describe one Academic Dean's experience of redesigning academic warning (AW) processes with first-year engineering students in a New Zealand University, after learning, developing, and applying the concepts and techniques of solution-focused (SF) brief therapy. These AW processes were changed from a deficit and failure orientation to a focus on…

Undergraduate science students face difficulties using mathematics in their physics courses. Choosing an institutional perspective, we consider that these students experience a permanent transition between mathematics in their mathematics courses and mathematics in their physics courses. We refer to the anthropological theory of the didactic and…

The United States military has encountered challenges in meeting recruitment and retention goals, during a time when college outdoor orientation programs have been reporting positive impacts on retention. This study investigated the impact of different first-year orientation program models on student sense of belonging and trust; factors linked to…

The federal government and a number of nonprofit, non-governmental agencies have invested heavily in programs designed to provide research opportunities, financial support, and mentorship to undergraduates in science-related fields. These efforts are aimed at supporting students' matriculation in science majors and into science-related careers.…

The present study examined the relationship between adult attachment and subjective social status (SSS) in college students through a cross-sectional survey (Study 1) and a longitudinal study (Study 2). In Study 1, 1300 college students were recruited via research flyers and online campus advertisements. They completed measures of adult attachment…

Resilience is of utmost importance for first-year undergraduate students to persist and flourish throughout the course of their studies. The researchers explored the comparative and simultaneous effect of two factors, i.e., emotional intelligence (EI) and critical thinking (CT) disposition in predicting the resilience of first-year undergraduate…

First-year seminars (FYS) comprise one of 11 researched interventions in postsecondary education known as High-Impact Practices, but few rigorous studies report significantly high impacts. This study examined a FYS employing propensity score matching to link cases and controls in a quasi-experimental design. One semester later cumulative grade…