First Year Experience: Orientation

This book offers a range of practical strategies, underpinned by relevant research, which lecturers can implement when charged with working with first year students in order to ease their transition to higher education.

College Belonging reveals how colleges and universities efforts to foster a sense of belonging in their students are misguided. Colleges bombard new students with the message to get out there! and find your place by joining student organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Nunn shows that this reflects a flawed understanding of what belonging is and how it works. Drawing on the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, College Belonging shows that belonging is something that members of a community offer to each other.

Copublished with the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, this is a comprehensive, practical, how-to guide to developing new first-year programs and enhancing existing programs. It identifies and discusses the multiple elements that contribute to sustained student success and to programs

This brief answers two key questions: (1) To what extent and in what ways do institutions offer support to first-year students in two-year programs?; and (2) To what extent and in what ways are these supports tailored to the needs of high-achieving students?

This article reviews literature on adult education, online learning, and first-year student success to articulate the scope of experiences and programs that ought to be included in institutional efforts aimed at helping adult students be successful in their first year of online education.

This article focuses on the development of an engaging library orientation module for UC San Diego First Year Experience (FYE) courses. The library module included a brief in-class presentation about research concepts and library services, an online interactive library scavenger hunt given as an in-class activity, and a homework assignment where students created public service announcements highlighting their favorite library space or resource.

I discuss quantitative and qualitative results of surveys among students in the Mathematics Orientation Seminar in Fall 2016 and Fall 2017, which suggest that this might be a useful course for other institutions to utilize within any major. Finally, I explore faculty perspectives and describe what I believe to be the final version of this course.

The First Year Experience (FYE) of the Glendale Community College in Glendale, California is to orient new students to the college, while creating a sense of community. The FYE Program at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) consists of a new student orientation program, early academic advising and peer mentoring.