Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Linking First-Year Undergraduate Students with Relevant Campus Resources #Retention #FYS


Recently, Noel-Levitz (http://blog.noellevitz.com/) posted an article on their blog titled, "Linking College Students with Relevant Retention Resources Throughout the First Year". This article REALLY stood out to me this year because I taught one of the First-Year experience courses at my university.

I was excited about this opportunity, because I have not taught an FYS course since I worked at Sam Houston State University. I loved teaching the course there and I still stay in contact with the students.

This year, I learned A LOT about our first-year students in the academic environment. In fact, I think this was a great effort for retaining our students in their individual academic colleges (and ultimately at the university). For example, I learned that first-year students do not know how to use technology for academic reasons, but they CAN LEARN how to do so.

I established a Facebook group for the first-year student enrolled in my class. At first, the students were VERY reluctant to join the group, but as the semester persisted, the students were able to help each other answer questions related to the course (and also to study material). In addition, we had several snow days in a row this week and the students were able to post pictures and ask questions about rescheduling their examinations.

Now, back to the article...Brandi Phillips highlighted several ways to link first-year college students with relevant college resources. These include:

- use assessment data to adjust intervention and retention strategies during the first-year

- engage first-year students in career planning

- build a bridge to the second term and beyond

Read the entire article here:

http://blog.noellevitz.com/2013/11/18/linking-students-relevant-resources-year/?utm_source=Strategies11212013&utm_campaign=optin&utm_medium=email

Sincerely - @drjtedwardsTSU

1 comment:

  1. I am not a millennial, I am a generation Xer. I am however a assistant professor in the allied health field. I do find that millennial students do not know how to use technology for learning. I have attempted to use blogs, discussion boards, and being very interactive via the use of technology but the students are very reluctant to interact in the course this way. What I have found is that millennial students want to be "spoon fed" information to simply pass test or quizzes without really truly understanding concepts. My major attempt was to use technology to teach team building and collaboration skills which are vital to working in the health care industry. Our general education department doesn't offer students courses on how to be a student or even how to use technology in their classes or academia. How were you able to do this?

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