Issue 26(2)
Exploring
the Evidence: Reporting research on First-Year Seminars Volume
III. (2005).
Barbara F. Tobolowsky, Bradley E. Cox, and Mary T. Wagner, Editors.
Columbia , SC : National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience
& Students in Transition. 197 pp. $35.00 (paperback). ISBN
# 1-889271-50-0.
Review
by: Vanetta
B. Bratcher
Academic
Enrichment Coordinator and TRiO
Scholars Program Associate Coordinator
The
Aldersgate Center
Indiana
Wesleyan
University
High
school graduation launches most 18-year olds into an exciting
journey toward college and career. This journey starts for thousands
of incoming college freshmen with some version of a first-year
seminar program. Designed to increase student success, these first-year
programs have become higher education's most popular movement
to enhance student achievement. This text, the third volume of
research published by the National
Resource
Center
for the First-Year Experience
and Students in Transition, captures identifying factors in this
movement's dramatic growth over the past twenty years.
As
different as the first-year students they serve, each campus program
offers characteristics that can help readers glean ways to facilitate
freshman success at their colleges. Editors Tobolowsky, Cox, and
Wagner highlight diversity and similarity among the first-year
programs at thirty-nine selected
public and private two and four-year institutions in North
America . Each
school's report provides a brief institutional profile, a narrative
that details the seminar structure used on that campus, characteristics
of the school's research plan, and findings regarding its first-year
program.
Most
useful for readers are indexes that group institutions by type,
affiliation, and seminar format. Characteristics such as seminars
functioning in learning communities or identification of specific
learning outcomes are also easily reviewed. The most common learning
outcomes will come as no surprise to those involved in first-year
student success: "Retention/Persistence" and "Student Self-Assessment,"
followed closely by "Academic Achievement/Grade Point Averages"
and "Student Satisfaction" (p.188-9).
Over
one-third of the institutions classified their seminars as "hybrids,"
meaning they blend multiple purposes into their seminars, such
as providing "Extended Orientation" along with "Basic Study Skills"
or "Academic [focus] with Uniform Content" (p.188). Reviewing
details of these seminars confirms that each program mixes, to
varying degrees, multiple seminar objectives, even while holding
primary outcomes central to their seminar curriculum.
Volume
III does not provide
readers with a large body of statistical research that can be
used to prove a perfect seminar curriculum for all institutions.
However, Volume III presents a window to view how schools
have crafted their seminars and a template readers can use to
compare each program to their own. Thus readers can "comparative
shop" without visiting thirty-nine campuses and can benefit from
innovations and insights program leaders have gained in serving
their students.
