Abstracts of Literature

Supporting Linked Curriculum Model for EOU FYE Program

(Copies of full articles can be found on Pierce Library Electronic Reserve under Core 102 First Year Experience.)

Small liberal arts institutions like EOU constantly deal with economic problems related to scale. However, despite these challenges, many small colleges are thriving. Revitalizing our small institution can occur through employing cost-effective, research-based models for raising retention rates.

Below are abstracts of some key literature that informs the FYE linking model. The full articles will be made available on Electronic Reserve under FYE, and a hard-copy set of these articles will be provided to each building for circulation. We will hold an FYE forum for discussion of these articles on October 2 at 4:00 pm. in Hoke 301.  We invite you to read these articles in full prior to the forum and to explore with your colleagues the possibility of linking courses for next year, 2008-9.

Please note the key features of successful FYE programs that all of these key articles share. 

• Linked courses that Create Cohorts and Contextualized Learning
• Collaborating Faculty
• Active Student-Centered Learning
• Strong Pro-Active Advising
• Emphasis on Student Success/Retention

Vincent Tinto, “Taking Student Retention Seriously”

What are the conditions that promote student retention? How do they apply to new students during the critical first year of college when deciding to stay or leave is unresolved? Student attributes are, for most institutions, beyond immediate control. Settings (classrooms, labs, residence halls …) are not. Five conditions that support retention are: expectation (students graduate and persist where expectations are high); advice (providing clear and consistent information and advice about institutional requirements, career options); support (academic, social and personal); involvement (frequency and quality of contact with faculty, staff and other students); learning (spending more time on task and with students). For that reason, colleges and universities should make learning communities and the collaborative pedagogy underlying them the hallmarks of the first-year experience (emphasis added).

Jay Chaskes, “The First-Year Student As Immigrant”

This paper offers a meaningful and unifying model for understanding the social and psychological dimensions of the student’s transition from high school to college. This model rests on the analogy to the immigrant experience. The student’s first-year experience is a process of resocialization to a new cultural environment very much like the process that immigrants experience upon their arrival in their new homeland. This resocialization process involves culture shock, ‘language’ acquisition, and the internalization of academic, bureaucratic, and social norms as well as the values and expectations of the college milieu. The author argues that academic communities have failed to establish a single unifying frame of reference or a model to appreciate fully the social and psychological dimensions of this transition. He explains that although orientation programs have a positive impact on ameliorating the difficulties of the first-year transition, extending these programs throughout the duration of the first year has even greater benefits for the student.  He concludes that it is a serious miscalculation to believe that students will assimilate to their new cultural surroundings in an efficacious and rewarding fashion without the programs, policies, and procedures that take specific aim at the resocialization process.

Richard Guarasci, “On the Challenge of Becoming the Good College”

Guarasci, award-winning president of Wagner College in New York City, outlines the spectacular successes of Wagner College’s vanguard “Wagner Plan.” His inspirational plan responded to mounting debt, stagnant enrollment, and waning alumni support with an initiative driven by linked and integrated active learning. No external grants were initially required, yet millions of dollars in net tuition revenue were realized by redeploying resources, thus increasing student retention from initial 60 percent levels to an ultimate ninety percent measure of success. Enrollment grew by nearly 90 percent in eight years. In real terms, the net millions gained in the operating budget would have required something on the order of another 40-50 million to the endowment in order to realize equivalent investment earnings.  Over the next eight years, these net funds served to increase the size of the tenure-track faculty by over 25 percent; expand the library staff; significantly fund information technology needs; lower the average teaching load by over 12.5 percent; fund more faculty scholarship support; create a writing center with a permanent staff; and fund an office of experiential learning to avail all faculty members and students with required placements in the freshman and senior programs as well as in the regular internship, practicum, and mentorship programs.  The Wagner Plan, on all levels, represents deep educational reform accomplished through the channels of common work, mutual respect, and the highest standards of intellectual endeavor. He writes, “Unlike many institutions that tinker with course offerings, we knew that the salvation of our college could come through dramatic refocusing and revitalization of not just what we teach but the way we teach.”  (emphasis added)  He argues that “change begins by sewing together the disparate parts of academic life into on whole fabric—albeit not new, but much improved.”  He underlines that “active learning should be the operative pedagogy” and that “all educational change on these type of campuses will more likely succeed when teachers continue to be learners.” His lesson #1:  “The work of meaningful progress in higher education, particularly midsize and smaller institutions, must focus on identifying and reaffirming the essential elements of the institution’s core mission:  the dedication to student learning and intellectual inquiry.  And the defining element of this equation rests on the inspiration of faculty members as agents of intellectual inquiry…[who] continue to be learners.”

Works Cited

Chaskes, Jay.  “The First Year Student As Immigrant.  Journal of the Freshman Year Experience & Students in Transitions.  1996.  Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 79-91.

Guarasci, Richard.  “On Becoming the Good College.”  Liberal Education. Winter 2006, pp. 14-21.

Tinto, Vincent.  (2001, June 19) Taking Student Retention Seriously. Annual Recruitment and Retention Conference, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Austin, Texas. Retrieved May 11, 2006 from http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/fsd/c2006/docs/takingretentionseriously.pdf