Mentoring to Become a Self-Directed Learner

This chapter provides a mentoring roadmap for success in college life and when transitioning to the workplace. First-year students learn that a successful mentee is self-directed, knows what to look for in a mentor, uses skills to engage in effective mentoring, and recognizes there are various types of mentoring relationships. The authors describe what a first-year student should look for when seeking an effective mentor. Readers are shown the benefits for using a developmental mentoring network and for becoming self-directed learners and mentees. The chapter includes activities and exercises to develop critical skills in self-understanding, listening, help-seeking, problem solving, and goal setting to be applied in both academic and professional settings. When successful people receive an award or recognition, what they have in common is they did not make it alone – others guided and supported their learning, growth, and success.

A gamified mobile application for first-year student orientation to promote library services

This study proposes a mobile application as a new approach for first-year student orientation to promote knowledge of library services using the gamification concept. The application is based on mobile devices with GPS to locate students, allowing them to catch, collect, and battle monsters around the library with questions on library service instructions. To evaluate the learning effectiveness of the approach, we performed a comparative experiment in which the control group used e-learning, while the experimental group used the mobile application of the CMU Journey. We evaluated the pre-and post-test scores, delayed 1-month post-test scores, and intrinsic motivation based on the IMI questionnaire. The results demonstrated that the preference for gamified experience among students can enhance knowledge retention and intrinsic motivation compared to other groups.

Teaching First-Year Students: Literature Review

The effectiveness of university academic process depends on how quickly and effectively a first-year student overcomes the challenges of the induction process. Creating conditions for the successful induction of students in the educational process is one of the priorities of higher education. This paper focuses on the literature review devoted to the main directions of current scientific research on the problem of adaptation of first-year students.

Transition and Adjustment of First-Year Student College in Dormitory: A Literature Review

The importance of transition and adjustment of students in the first year is interesting to study, and this paper examines the role of campus dormitories in assisting first year students in their transition and adjustment. There are several articles on reviews of transitions and adjustment of first-year students to be found. The purpose of this review is to find out the role of dormitories in the transition and adjustment period of first year students. Based on the results of a literature review, we found that campus dormitories can help students in transitioning and adjusting to their first year.

Cultural signals in understanding firt-year student engagement: How can universities become more culturally sensitive? The case of a rural South African university

High levels of student engagement, particularly in first-year university students are associated with a wide range of educational practices and conditions including students’ social and academic integration into the institutions of higher education. These educational practices link student engagement with students’ performance to students’ academic achievement leading to graduate throughputs. The study sought to understand first-year student experiences of the university’s ability to provide an academic environment that is conducive and responsive to learning for students with unique characteristics. Data were generated from first-year students enrolled for a Bachelor of Education degree in a rural South African University using focus group interviews with students that were purposively selected from this cohort using areas of specialization as the criteria. Also, one-on-one interviews were conducted with students that had performed well in their examinations as well as those that did not perform so well. The results revealed that students’ cultural orientations are a precursor of how student would thrive in their academic journey and that students’ cultural repertoires influence the extent to which students integrate and engage both academically and socially into the university environment. In this article, we argue that students’ cultural orientations have implications in their academic performance and social integration in their first year of study at university. This article contributes to the ongoing research agenda of student engagement, academic success, first-year student experience and throughput employing students’ cultural signals as another dimension to understand such critical phenomena.

Source discernment – the root of all information literacy?

Is source discernment at the root of all information literacy? In today’s media landscape, finding information is easy. Finding information that is scientifically correct and trustworthy is much more difficult. An added problem for students today is that all this available information come in similar formats. When all information is presented as a pdf on your screen, how do you know what you ́re reading? How is a first year student with no previous academic experience really supposed to discern between a scholarly article, a book chapter, a conference article, a white paper, a popular science article, a scientific report and a doctoral thesis? And yet the ability to do so is fundamental for the information evaluation process. If you are not sure what you are reading, how can you evaluate the quality of the information? To ease our students’way into academic writing we now start our information literacy teaching with identifying different sources of information. Reference writing and information searching are then taught from this angle. Student assignments and feedback from teachers show that this seems to improve the quality of the sources the students use in their work as well as their ability to write correct references. We would like to discuss this with colleagues from other universities with similar or other experiences. The questions we would like to focus on are: How a first year student with no previous academic experience is really supposed to discern between different types of scholarly and non-scholarly information materials and how we as library instructors can help our students with this? What are the experience of other librarians and are there any good examples of strategies or classroom exercises?