Know Your Safe Drinking Skills: Adaptation Strategies for the College Effect

Objective: The current study investigates the effects of an alcohol-prevention program delivered to college students in a formal classroom setting. Participants: The sample comprised 231 first-year college students who enrolled in a multisection “First Year Experience” course at a large northeastern university in the United States. Method: A naturalistic experiment was conducted, with a baseline evaluation at the beginning of the semester and a post-experiment evaluation near the end of the semester. Results: Social drinking attitudes, proximal drinking norm and the college effect are significant predictors of pre- and post-intervention episodic drinking frequency. The intervention reduced episodic drinking frequency as well as perceived distal and proximal drinking norms. It also increased drinking attitudes and did not change perceived efficacy or drinking-outcome expectancies. Conclusions: Practitioners could consider implementing a similar intervention to allow students to learn and practice safe drinking skills in the first year of their college life.

Egocentric Projection is a Rational Strategy for Accurate Emotion Prediction

People need to accurately understand and predict others’ emotions in order to build and maintain meaningful social connections. However, when they encounter new social partners, people often do not have enough information about them to make accurate inferences. Rather, they often resort to an egocentric heuristic, and make predictions about a target by using their own self-knowledge as a proxy. Is this egocentric heuristic a form of cognitive bias, or is it a rational strategy for real-world social prediction? If egocentrism provides a rational and effective solution to the challenging task of social prediction in naturalistic contexts, we should expect that a) egocentric predictions tend to be more accurate, and b) people rely on self-knowledge to a greater extent when it’s more likely to be a good proxy. Using an emotion prediction task and personality measures, we assessed similarity and predictive accuracy between first year college students and their new acquaintance roommate. Results demonstrated that, when people need to make predict an unfamiliar target’s emotions, self-knowledge can often effectively approximate knowledge about others, and thus support accurate predictions. Moreover, participants that were typical of the sample, whose self-knowledge can better approximate information about the target, relied more on self-knowledge in their predictions, and thus achieved higher accuracy. These findings suggest that people rationally tune their use of egocentrism based on whether it is likely to pay off. Overall, these findings demonstrate a rational side to a cognitive phenomenon usually framed as a cognitive pitfall, namely egocentric projection, when its natural decision context is taken into consideration.

Meaning making of mentorship for the tuition-free student

PurposeThe study aimed to explore how student recipients of a full-tuition scholarship envision, define and experience mentorship and the types of relationships they have and expect from mentors. The study adds to the growing body of literature on mentorship as supplemental support for college student success.Design/methodology/approachSemi-structured interviews of 20 first-year college students in the Mid-West United States were collected as a part of a more extensive mixed-methods study. The authors used a four-phase process to refine, derive meaning and develop themes. Kegan's orders of consciousness explain how students make meaning of mentorship.FindingsStudents described mentoring as a service that could provide specific transactional features. Ten participants were unable to acknowledge a mentoring relationship at all, despite describing mentoring experiences and opportunities. Students often align with Kegan's second order, which focuses on self and valuing transactional, short-term relationships. Adjusting approaches to explaining mentorship and the value of building relationships appear to be an opportunity for research and practice.Originality/valueThis study illustrates an apparent disconnect between the intent of mentorship and the experiences of mentees. The students' experiences add a valuable perspective that supports the need to further refine mentoring practices in meaningful ways to impact student success, persistence and retention.

Multimodality as a Communicative Tool for Social Engagement and Reform

This article acknowledges the viability of multimodal projects in first-year college-level writing courses in accordance with the evolution of composition pedagogy over the past forty years. Since the 1982 publication of Hairston’s article “The Winds of Change” forecasting the end of the then-ubiquitous current-traditional approach, composition pedagogy has undergone paradigm shifts from process to post-process theory and from textual to digital modes of composition. Inspired by Goodwin’s (2020) research on students’ multimodal responses to local community issues, I developed a public media project for my first-year writing course for which students created media texts addressing local, regional, national, and global issues of their choosing. The project synthesizes the public and interpretative dimensions of writing identified by post-process scholars with elements of multimodality and civic engagement to help students understand how public media texts raise social awareness of current issues and mobilize community efforts toward unified resolution of such issues.

Error Analysis of College Students’ Spoken English

Based on the theory of Error Analysis, this thesis records the production of spoken English of first year college students of Northwestern Polytechnical University as samples. After listening to the recorder repeatedly and carefully, the author classifies and describes the errors found in the corpus, investigates the causes of these errors and provides solutions to these problems. It is found that there are errors of performance, phonological errors, lexical errors, grammatical errors and pragmatic errors in this study. Reasons for these errors can be explained from the perspectives of interlingual transfer, intralingual interference, cognitive and affective factors, and communicative strategies. Accordingly, some countermeasures could be taken to effectively decrease errors.

Students with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Their First-Year College Experiences

Using data from the 2019 CIRP Freshman Survey and the Your First College Year (YFCY) from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, this study explores the differences between the characteristics and behaviors of the first-year students with autism spectrum disorders (17) and those of students with learning disabilities (102). The findings indicate that the characteristics of these two groups of first-year college students were similar except for gender, ethnicity, first college generation, and parents’ income. Compared with first-year college students with LD, students with ASD were less likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors, use health services and the writing center.

Resilience and Academic Self-Concept as Explanatory Variables of Achievement Motivation Among College Students

People with high achievement motives will act in ways that will help them to outperform others, meet or surpass some standards of excellence, or do something unique. Several variables have been suggested in the literature to significantly contribute to students’ achievement motivation. As the principal aim, the study sought to investigate whether or not resilience and academic self-concept significantly contribute to students’ achievement motivation. A cross-sectional research design was employed to sample 327 first year college students from five College of Education institutions in Ghana using proportionate stratified sampling procedure. Three instruments (i.e., resilience scale, academic self-concept scale and achievement motivation scale) were adapted and used for the study. Findings of the study showed that students’ sampled were resilient and had high academic self-concept. The results further showed that resilience and academic self-concept variables were significant predictors of achievement motivation. The study recommends that academic counseling within Colleges of Education in Ghana should be made a priority in order to address issues of self-doubt and that of learned helplessness, particularly to maintain or improve individual resilience and achievement motivation. Other implications are discussed.

Chemistry in Quantitative Language

Chemistry in Quantitative Language is an invaluable guide to solving chemical equations and calculations. It provides readers with intuitive and systematic strategies to carry out the many kinds of calculations they will meet in general chemistry. Each chapter introduces the basic theories and concepts of a particular topic, focusing on relevant equations. Worked examples illuminate each type of problem, with carefully explained step-by-step solutions. Since chemistry problems can be presented in a number of ways, the examples include several versions of each question. To help students understand and retain the procedures, the solutions discuss not only what steps to carry out to reach solutions, but why. Additional problems, with answers, are included at the end of each chapter. The book is intended as a companion to a standard chemistry textbook, but can also be used on its own for review. Its primary audience is students in first-year college and university chemistry classes; it can also help in preparing for GCE Advanced Level, GRE subject test, AP Chemistry, MCAT and similar tests.