First-year students are new to learning in the college environment. Instructors can take steps to help students transition to new ways of learning and form community with their peers. This page offers strategies from research literature and our L&S colleagues for supporting first-year students.
Pick one Mini Discussion below and include a 10-15 minute conversation in your next group meeting.
1. Encourage Rigorous Engagement with Homework
Students who are earlier in their college careers may be less comfortable with nuance and with expressing imperfectly formed ideas. They may also lack skills in critical analysis, and lack confidence in constructing knowledge despite uncertainty. These students can benefit from a scaffolded approach to learning these disciplinary skills, which begins with having clear expectations for how to engage with course readings and materials outside of class meetings. In a conversation with the L&S Exchange, Professor Greg Downey shares how he frames the goals and expectations for engaging with course readings.
Excerpt from L&S Exchange Episode 22: Building a Reservoir of Trust: Early Semester Tips (14:14-15:38) with Greg Downey, Evjue-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and the Information School.
I assign a lot of readings in my classes. And students sometimes don’t know what to make of this. Don’t know how much time to spend on something like this. Don’t know how to jump into a reading and extract something of value or even why they’re reading it, right? How do I extract something of value when I don’t know the purpose of what I’m doing?
…and they don’t have to do it alone, right? They’re going to bring those half-formed ideas into the discussion section and we’ll work it out there. And they can bring questions. It’s great to be able to come in and say, I spent an hour on this reading and I have no idea what it’s about and this is why I have no idea because this part befuddles me, help me. That’s a great outcome of spending that hour of homework doing your reading. So I don’t think students quite know that going in.
Discussion Questions:
- How might encouraging student questioning help students engage more rigorously with your course material?
- How might you structure evaluation and in-class time to allow for student questions or uncertainty?
2. Consider Student Needs at Different Points
The “W-Curve” (see image at right) is a model that describes stages that first-year students pass through when adjusting to college life. Support from instructors can be especially impactful when students feel an initial “culture shock” or a phase of “mental isolation”—two low points in the transition experience (Zeller & Mosier, 1993). Research suggests that the period immediately following midterm exams is a time when students are particularly receptive to encouragement and guidance (Cameron & Rideout, 2022).
For further reading and an example of an L&S instructor addressing the W-Curve, see our article “Supporting First-Year students” by Maria Widmer.
Cameron, R. B., & Rideout, C. A. (2022). ‘It’s been a challenge finding new ways to learn’: First-year students’ perceptions of adapting to learning in a university environment. Studies in Higher Education, 47(3), 668-682. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1783525
Zeller, W. J., & Mosier, R. (1993). Culture shock and the first-year experience. Journal of College and University Student Housing, 23(2).
Discussion Questions:
- Does the W-Curve resonate with what you’ve observed from first-year students?
- Pick one point in the W curve. What small step could you take to support first-year students during this period?
3. Help Students Grow from Where They Are
First-year students arrive at UW-Madison with a variety of personal and academic backgrounds. In a conversation with the L&S Exchange, Professor Brittney Edmonds discusses how that can lead to student insecurity in the classroom and how she hopes to encourage student growth in their academic skills.
Excerpt from L&S Exchange Episode 10: The First Day of Class (8:35-9:21) with Brittney Edmonds, Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies.
And so often there’s that disconnect where students are trying to figure out how they can use the knowledge they already have, but also figuring out maybe where that knowledge needs to be sort of refined. And I think that’s a real difficulty for students who don’t feel like they’re coming from a really strong foundation in literary study. It can produce a lot of insecurities.
So I want to address those in my freshman course. Yeah, that’s going to be my main goal. Figuring out how to talk to them about whatever feelings of unpreparedness they might have. I think students struggle with that and you know, one of the things I’m always trying to communicate is that you can only learn from wherever you are. Right? There’s no way to jump ahead of–you know, you have whatever skills you have, and that’s going to be true today. That’s going to be true tomorrow, until you take the next step to further those skills.
Discussion Questions:
- What familiarity do students have with the content and approaches in your course? Consider both formal, academic experiences as well as informal experiences that students might bring.
- How might you validate various levels of student preparedness while also encouraging student growth?
4. Build a Community of Valued Individuals
First-year students may enter your classroom with anxiety about course content. They also are unlikely to know other students in their courses. This means they can benefit greatly from activities that help them create connections early in the course. In a conversation with the L&S Exchange, Professor Ralph Grunewald shares that he cares about creating a community atmosphere that values each student from the very first day of class.
Excerpt from L&S Exchange Episode 10: The First Day of Class (3:53-4:54) with Ralph Grunewald, Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Law, Society, and Justice.
How can I show that I care about students and that learning is important and that we do super exciting, interesting, fascinating stuff, that they will learn cool stuff and learn methods and skills? But at the beginning, it’s important to kind of take out the anxiety and remove barriers. That’s what I’m thinking about right now. Not so much content. This will come, like, second week. But right now it’s like, how do I create an atmosphere of “we”?
I send everyone an email, a Canvas announcement, and welcome them to the class prior to the first class and ask them to bring a piece of paper on which they write their name. And if they don’t, I bring Sharpies and paper to the class and every student, all 375, have to write down their first name on a piece of paper, their pronouns, and then put that in front of them. So that’s one thing that’s super important to me to individualize the class. That’s important that we all have names, that we are there as individuals.
Discussion Questions:
- How might an “atmosphere of we” improve student engagement and learning in your course?
- What is one step you could take to encourage a community of valued individuals in your course? Consider how asking students to share information about themselves, their prior experience, or their preferences can communicate that your classroom community values their ideas.
5. Support Good Study Behaviors
The term “hidden curriculum” refers to the unspoken cultural norms and expectations that are privileged in higher education institutions (Birtill et al., 2024). One area of college life that may be hidden for first-year students are the study behaviors that will help them learn and be successful in their courses. The study habits that students relied on in high school may be less effective in college due to the faster pace of classes, reduced in-class time, and other factors.
To address the need to uncover the hidden curriculum, three faculty members at the University of Leeds produced a Student Guide to the Hidden Curriculum.* In this guide, they outline several topics within “good study behaviors” that instructors might clarify and explain to students. Review the list at right and consider the questions below.
*Read more about the creation of the guide: Blundell-Birtill, P., Harris, R., & Pownall, M. (2024). “Development of the ‘student guide to the hidden curriculum.'”Open Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 3(2), 22–29. https://doi.org/10.56230/osotl.66
Good study behaviors – How can students effectively do the following?
- Study independently
- Take notes
- Read (to accomplish specific objectives)
- Reflect on their learning
- Think critically
- Write (to accomplish specific objectives)
- Respond if they don’t understand something
- Accept that learning isn’t always comfortable
Adapted from “The Student Guide to the Hidden Curriculum,” produced by The Quality Assurance Agency of Higher Education, 2022.
Discussion Questions:
- Do you explain what good study behaviors look like for your course?
- Pick 2-3 topics that seem most relevant to your course. How might you help students better understand these?