Setting the Stage for Success: Engaging First Year Students in Gateway Courses

The summer is over, you’re done high school, and the first semester of your freshman year is looming. If this student was you, the anticipation about what is coming can be overwhelming. Even some of the most accomplished high school students struggle with the steep increase in workload and being fully accountable for their work—not to mention the new social structure to their lives. Interestingly, this narrative is no longer the norm. As the texture of the student population continues to evolve, institutions have a short window of opportunity to offer support mechanisms to help first year students succeed.

Changing demographics

One of the major aspects that institutions have to contend with is the changing demographics of students. The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario indicates that non-traditional students now comprise the majority of students entering their freshman year of post-secondary education. Non-traditional students can include the following: first generation students, students with disabilities, visible minorities, and mature students. Research suggests that these students are more at-risk due to a number of factors outside responsibilities, lack of support structures, and the reasons mentioned above.

This is where engaging at-risk students and collecting actionable feedback can make a huge difference for student retention and reducing attrition rates. Institutions that actively seek to measure student preparedness, moving from secondary to tertiary institutions, by addressing known factors that lead to DFWI rates are poised to make a real difference in retention, like the Gateway program at Lakehead University. Other programs like the summer bridge program at West Virginia University, called the ‘STEM boot camp’, help prepare entering students for the rigor required for success in their freshman year.

Gateway courses and large lecture halls

Freshman year gateway courses can make it easy for students to get lost in the fray. With hundreds of students packed into one room, participating in discussions can be daunting. This sort of collective pseudo-isolation can make it difficult for students to understand how well they’re doing. With no context for self-reflection, instructors and institutions as a whole have an opportunity to provide students the necessary support by including them first-hand in the learning process.

The best way to accomplish this is to solicit candid student feedback using low-stakes exercises that encourage an assessment of the course, their classmates, and themselves. Many dedicated educators perform exercises like this, mostly on the analogue level—paper and pencil. The ubiquity and robustness of higher education IT systems like discussion forums in the LMS or in-class feedback technologies facilitate this process to a much greater degree. Having to collect and review student paper submissions that have little or no bearing on their overall grade can be tedious. The use of online tools streamlines this process so that students can conduct these exercises autonomously and submit when they’re comfortable.

Allowing students to keep their identities safe is an important aspect of candid student feedback. Of course, it’s important to design these exercises with questions that give instructors the answers they need.

Implementing feedback

Collecting feedback isn’t nearly as important as what instructors do with it. To keep the process engaging, it is crucial that students experience the changes as a result of their participation. One of the major hurdles for institutions seeking to increase student response rates for traditional summative feedback mechanisms, like end-of-term course evaluations, is that students don’t understand the ‘WIIFT’ (what’s in it for them). Any changes that occur as a result of filling out these formal surveys are retroactive and only impact the following stream of students or later.

Sharing feedback in-class (anonymously) validates the student involvement and provides context for the improvements that are important to not only students, but to instructors looking to make positive changes in the classroom learning environment. Tracking how these improvements are changing over time also provides important feedback for tenure and first year instructors alike. For tenure track instructors, this feedback can identify teaching blind spots that allow them to go from good to great, where first year instructors might want to know what they should start doing, stop doing, or continue doing to improve the learning experience of their students.

Feedback is key

At every stage, candid student feedback can be beneficial for both students and instructors. Engaging students early can mean the difference between success and failure, while instructors have a golden opportunity to gain real insights into their teaching effectiveness. In the next blog post, we will cover technologies that specifically address some of these feedback challenges and discuss the positive benefits of leveraging these technologies for future success.