Generating, weaving and curating: disciplinary processes for reading literary text

Purpose The purposes of this study is to expand on previous work in English language arts (ELA) disciplinary literacy and to unpack literary text reading processes across three different participant groups. Design/methodology/approach The authors recruited literary scholars and first-year college students to read literary texts aloud and voice their thoughts. Transcripts were collaboratively coded and analyzed using a priori and emergent coding. Findings This study presents the findings in two ways. First, this study grouped the codes into four categories, namely, background knowledge, comprehension, disciplinary knowledge and building an interpretation. This described the differences in frequencies among the participants’ strategy use. Next, to more fully describe how participants read literary texts, this study presents the data using three processes, namely, generating, weaving and curating. These findings indicate a continuum of strategies and processes used by participants. Practical implications The study suggests using the ELA heuristic for instruction, which includes moving students beyond generating and weaving by asking them to do their own interpretive work of curation. This potential roadmap for instruction avoids a deficit mindset for students by recommending low-stakes opportunities that meet students where they are as they build their capacity for interpretive moves. Originality/value The findings help the field to gain an understanding of what novices and experts do when they read literary text, including both strategies and processes. This study also provide an ELA heuristic that has instructional implications. This study adds to the body of knowledge for disciplinary literacy in ELA in both theoretical and practical ways.

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.

Perceptions of Discrimination Predict Retention of College Students of Color: Connections with School Belonging and Ethnic Identity

This longitudinal study examines (a) whether perceptions of ethnic discrimination during the first weeks of college predicted later school belonging among first-year college students of color ( N = 638) attending a predominantly White institution (PWI), (b) whether school belonging, in turn, predicted retention to the second year, and (c) whether ethnic identity centrality buffered the effects of discrimination on school belonging and academic retention. Participants completed measures of ethnic discrimination and identity near the beginning of the first semester and school belonging at the end of the semester. Academic data from the fall of the second year were obtained from school records. Tests of moderated mediation revealed that perceptions of discrimination at the beginning of college had an indirect effect on retention in the second year of college, as mediated by lowered school belonging, but only for students with low and moderate (but not high) ethnic identity centrality.

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.

Does Instructional Mode Alter the Effectiveness of a Curricular Response to Campus Sexual Violence?

Online coursework is becoming a teaching and learning staple in higher education, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is minimal literature regarding academic courses for campus sexual violence prevention, particularly comparing online versus face-to-face modalities. This study examined whether the effectiveness of a semester-long credit-bearing course (GESS 1900), designed to educate first year college students about correlates of sexual violence in order to ultimately reduce campus sexual violence, differed by instructional mode. Two cohorts had completed GESS 1900 in-person when the COVID-19 pandemic struck; the third cohort was taught entirely online through synchronous instruction and with the exact same faculty instructors and course materials. This created a natural experiment to compare outcomes by instructional mode. We used a quasi-experimental, pretest–posttest survey design to compare in-person ( n = 92) versus online ( n = 45) GESS 1900 students across eight previously validated attitudinal measures related to gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. Results from a two-way, mixed-factorial ANOVA showed no significant differences related to instructional mode on seven of the eight measures. Findings further showed change over time in the desired direction for all students, regardless of instructional mode; many measures showed different starting points for the two groups, but similar rates of change over time. Thus both in-person and synchronous online versions of GESS 1900 were effective in shaping positive student outcomes. The findings have important implications for educators seeking new or multiple delivery methods to educate college students about the pressing health concern of sexual violence.

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.

Factors Influencing Life Satisfaction of First Year University Students

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of psychosocial factors and addiction-related factors on the life satisfaction of college freshmen.Methods: This study used the data of 212 first-year college students from the survey on the actual condition of addiction conducted by the B Addiction Management Integrated Support Center in G Metropolitan City in 2017.Results: Life satisfaction of college students was found to have an inverse correlation with smartphone addiction and depression, and there was a correlation between life satisfaction and social support. As a result of analyzing the variables affecting the life satisfaction of freshmen in college, social support, school life satisfaction, depression, economic level, and smartphone addiction were in the following order.Conclusions: It is necessary to develop various interventions and related programs for the prevention of problems related to psychosocial and addiction issues in order to improve life satisfaction of university freshmen.

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.