First Year Experience

Based on four studies that meet WWC group design standards, "first year experience courses" were found to have potentially positive effects on credit accumulation, degree attainment (college), and general academic achievement (college) for freshman college students.

The study draws on diverse students’ experiences with access, support, and long-term success within community colleges to assess how these programs foster student success, as told through the voices of student participants.

In this study, we explored whether a uniquely designed First Year Experience (FYE) class for newly admitted at-risk college students would increase academic success; help students avoid academic probation; and increase retention for the following semester.

Colleges redesign the first-year experience to improve retention, learning outcomes, and students' sense of belonging.

Implementing a mandatory first‐year experience program that requires new students to participate in orientation, advising, and a college success course.

Today, faculty and staff at most institutions take seriously their mandate to help first-year students succeed, delivering on an implied moral obligation to both challenge and support those to whom they grant admission. But helping students to succeed can be difficult. What do we know about learning that can help students overcome these difficulties?

First-year experience programs and activities are explicitly designed to retain students, as well as improve learning and program completion—goals that are well-aligned with the needs of the two-year sector. However, the same conditions that negatively impact achievement, retention, and graduation among two-year students may pose obstacles for engaging them in traditional first-year programming or services in ways similar to the more traditional four-year students for whom these programs were originally developed.

Beyond understanding whether first-year student success interventions
in community colleges are effective—for which there is mixed evidence in the literature—this study’s purpose was to uncover how they work to realize observed outcomes, including at times unanticipated undesirable outcomes.

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Community colleges increasingly implement various student success programs, including 1st-year seminars, college skills
courses, learning communities, and orientation, in an effort to boost degree completion. However, it is unclear how success programs’ curricular designs may contribute to these and associated student outcomes.

These stories show what college readiness really means and offer valuable insights about the academic, social, monetary and other forces that can overwhelm the typical college-bound student.

Based on four studies that meet WWC group design standards, "first year experience courses" were found to have potentially positive effects on credit accumulation, degree attainment (college), and general academic achievement (college) for freshman college students.

College student success courses are designed to help students develop effective self-regulating learning (SRL) skills. Little research has examined students' perceptions of SRL at course end. The purpose of this study was to examine student perceptions of "what makes an effective college student" in regards to SRL after course completion.

44 institutions have formed a learning community that reviews and shares evidence-based practices, programs, and implementation strategies designed to increase student success, particularly among first-generation college students, students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, and students from low-income families who are not achieving as well as other students.

doctoral dissertation

Center for Community College Student Engagement

Offering key resources and relevant research to assist community college
staff, faculty, and administrators in developing, implementing, and evaluating promising and high-impact programs and practices.

Beginning college students experiencing difficulty in reading or writing academic texts may benefit from interventions and additional support

Using data from the Virginia Community College System and building upon prior Floridabased research, this study examines whether student success course enrollment, as well as student and institutional characteristics, has positive associations with shorterterm student outcomes, including earning any college credits within the first year and persistence into the second year.

Underpreparation is typically viewed in terms of deficiencies in students’ basic academic skills, specifically in those skills integral to the reading, writing, and mathematics subject areas. Community college educators maintain, however, that many entering students are also unprepared in other important ways.

Student success courses serve as extended college orientations for entering students.

The present study finds that students who enrolled in a student success course in the first semester were more likely to earn any college-level credits within the first year and were more likely to persist to the second year. T

The widespread presence of the student success class— most often a combination of study skills, life skills, and career exploration—is an acknowledgement that is the educational task is not solely cognitive.