Prioritizing Reflection and Integrative Learning in First-Year Seminar Courses

Abstract

First-Year Seminar (FYS) or First-Year Experience (FYE) courses help college students transition to college, learn valuable academic skills, and create successful habits. This research analyzes the benefit of reorganizing FYS curriculum around reflection and integrative learning, by comparing students who participated in this redesigned curriculum with those who participated in a skills-based, extended orientation first-year seminar course. The two groups were compared on several measures, including perception about the utility of reflective and integrative thinking, first year retention, and first year GPA. Our findings suggest that prioritizing reflection and integrative learning in a FYS seminar is beneficial.

The Wicked and the Logical: Facilitating Integrative Learning Among Introductory Computing Students

“…In this study, we situate reflection as both evidence for and part of the larger integrative learning process. Indeed, as previously noted, the two go hand-in-hand, with one component playing an integral role in the other (Aguila 2016; Rust and Korstange 2018). For the purposes of this study, too, we have treated reflection as primarily a linguistic construct, and our analysis of it as an act of interpreting the latent structures that underlay that construct.…”

"This Research that We are Doing is Just the Beginning of the Conversation”: Undergraduate Researchers Enacting Literacies of Relationality

“…A year later, we returned to NCTE in Houston, Texas. We read excerpts of this manuscript alongside two teams of faculty authors sharing findings of YPAR inquiries at their universities, further reflecting and learning on a panel presentation on experiences across our first year (Rust & Korstange, 2018).…”

“…Undergraduate participants discussed possibilities for student affairs educators to engage "proactive outreach" toward "creating community and demonstrating care for individual student circumstances" (p. 1). Rust and Korstange (2018) found benefits for students participating in first-year seminar courses through "prioritizing reflection and integrative learning" (p. 76). Morgan et al (2020), in a study examining the "orientation and transitional experiences" of Black undergraduate students attending a public research university in an urban setting, found that participants observed a "shortage of Black faculty, limited Black cultural programming, and a need for identity-based space" (p. 1).…”

“…As an approach in adolescent literacy teaching and research, Wissman et al (2015) called attention to "research pedagogies" of "created spaces, engaged participation, and embodied inquiry" (p. 186) across adolescents' multimodal literacy activities. Relationality and the building of reciprocal teaching and learning in our research collaboration unfolded as connective threads across the design, enactment, and public sharing of a photovoice project that had its beginnings in a for-credit summer bridge program, and extended across more than two years of weekly research-team meetings involving the examination of undergraduates' transition experiences (Morgan et al, 2020;Rust & Korstange, 2018).…”

“…From the start, we referred to ourselves as a research team, and to our sessions as research-team meetings. Beginning a practice we came to understand as an integral component to critical listening and storying, and orientation and transition experiences, Terry opened each research-team meeting with a "check-in" (Edwards et al, 2014, p. 433;Rust & Korstange, 2018). We then engaged a range of teaching and research activities across the semester.…”