The First Year of College Research, Theory, and Practice on Improving the Student Experience and Increasing Retention

This book is premised on a very powerful social/educational concern about college retention rates: one-third of first-year students seriously consider leaving college during their first term, and only half of all students who start college ultimately graduate. This book examines the first year of college from a variety of perspectives to paint a comprehensive picture of the intersecting challenges facing today's students and higher education institutions. Technological advances, increases in college attendance costs, and increasing political pressure on colleges to prove their value have changed the landscape of the first year of college, but researchers have identified new approaches to improve student and institutional success that have shown considerable success and promise. In this comprehensive volume, top educational researchers explore topics of student success, persistence, and retention in the first year of college.

Preface; Part I. Societal and Demographic Factors Underlying First-Year Student Success: 1. Exploring the role of affordability on first-year student access and persistence Jamey Rorison, Mamie Voight and Alain Poutré; 2. Realizing the educational benefits of diversity: a state of perpetual institutional self-correction Michell J. Chang; 3. First-generation college student success Evan Mulfinger, Chen Zuo, Frederick L. Oswald and Alex Casillas; Part II. Practices that Foster Student Success: 4. Investigating first-year seminars as a high-impact practice Jennifer R. Keup and Dallin George Young; 5. Transforming the 'real first-year experience': the case for and approaches to improving gateway courses Andrew K. Koch and John N. Gardner; 6. Strengthening success for students with multiple risk factors David A. Laude, Lindsey A. Kaschner, Cassandre Giguere Alvarado and Carolyn K. Connerat; 7. Student engagement and retention James Cole, Robert Gonyea and Louis Rocconi; 8. Bloom's 2 sigma problem and data-driven approaches for improving student success Alfred Essa and Stephen Laster; Part III. Attitude and Behavior Change Promoting Student Success: 9. Nudges, norms, and navigation: behavioral insights to improve student success Benjamin Castleman and Katharine Meyer; 10. Promoting mindset change and student success Robert S. Feldman, Karan Goel, Arthur Blakemore and Mattityahu Zimbler; 11. Stereotype threat and stereotype inoculation: barriers that prevent and interventions that promote the success of underrepresented students in the first year of college Tara C. Dennehy, Jacqueline S. Smith, Chelsea Moore and Nilanjana Dasgupta; Index.

Robert S. Feldman is Deputy Chancellor and Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has authored numerous scientific papers and books, including editing or co-editing several volumes, among them The Social Psychology of Education (Cambridge, 1990); Applications of Nonverbal Behavioral Theories and Research (1992); as well as The First Year of College (2005). He is also the author of P.O.W.E.R. Learning: Strategies for Success in College and Life (seventh edition, 2017) and Understanding Psychology (fourteenth edition, 2018).