Teaching First-Semester First-Year Students
By Alyssa Harben, PhD
Spring 2025
One thing that I have noticed is often underdiscussed in formal pedagogy conversations is the effect of students’ experiences (or lack of experience) with college-level coursework on their ability to excel in a college course. However, this topic is widely addressed in more casual teaching conversations. It is common in higher education discourse today to hear complaints about how “students these days” no longer know how to read or write at a college level, or complaints about how students ignore due dates and submit late work expecting full credit without a prior conversation with the instructor or reviewing the policies in the syllabus regarding late work. While these complaints are nothing new (Leamnson, 1999), they are also unproductive if not paired with action to address the concerns. There is a unique opportunity in a student’s first semester to reset the habits they had in high school that will no longer serve them, reinforce the habits that will continue to help, and support their establishment of new habits to carry through the rest of their time in college. Faculty can and should support students in this transition to the more rigorous academic standards of college if they are teaching first-year courses.
First-semester first-year students with no experience of college-level coursework are in the position of needing to learn to navigate the new norms of college while also attempting to learn new content (CTRL). First-semester international students are especially important to consider: not only are they adjusting to new educational norms, but they are also adjusting to a new cultural context outside the classroom. These unstated rules, norms, or procedures are often referred to as the hidden curriculum (CTRL). All instructors of first-semester first-year college students should be aware of these unique opportunities and challenges, even as the AU Core Foundations classes can help students with some of this transitional knowledge of college.
First-semester students need to learn to navigate the new norms of college while also attempting to learn new content.
I suggest some ways professors could adapt their pedagogical approaches to help students bridge the gap between high school and university: address hidden curriculum topics purposefully, strategically use assessments to create positive academic habits, and provide low-stakes opportunities to learn the soft skills necessary to navigate college.
Address the hidden curriculum
An important way to enable student success is to address how learning happens and how universities function in the classroom. While solutions to many problems can seem obvious to those of us who have many years of experience on a college or university campus, first-semester students do not have that wealth of first-hand knowledge to draw upon. Additionally, simply saying what something is often isn’t enough to make it meaningful (Leamnson, 1999). Understanding the hidden curriculum is more than just recognizing vocabulary words. It is embodied knowledge that facilitates a student’s success, not just awareness of policy or resource(s).
Because it is often challenging to convince a student of the merit of a resource through words alone, another way you can address the hidden curriculum is by designing your assessments to require students to practice using different university resources to build embodied knowledge, not just awareness. For example, in addition to listing the timing and location of your office hours on the syllabus, you might explain what office hours are and why a student might want to meet with you. You could also go beyond and require students to have conferences with you to ensure they’ll experience firsthand what to expect from office hours visits with faculty in their college careers.
When I taught an introductory interdisciplinary science course, for one of my assignments, I asked students to find a peer-reviewed article published within the last 5 years related to a topic covered in the class and write a short summary of the article and a description of how it relates to the class content. This exercise enabled the reinforcement of a few hidden curriculum concepts: writing and secondary research as important skills in the sciences as well as the humanities, the utility of the university library as a research resource, and the reality that knowledge is dynamic—it’s continually being developed through research.
Most importantly, don’t rely on assumptions that other courses should be giving your students the skills you are going to be assessing them on. This is especially important if you are teaching an introductory course, with no prerequisites or co-requisites, that is sequenced to occur in the student’s first semester. Instead, you should ensure that what you are assessing aligns with the learning goals of the course, and that you are teaching what you are assessing.
Use assessments to foster positive academic habits
Identifying and developing habits that set the stage for academic success in the future is a task first-semester first-year students undertake both consciously and unconsciously. Preparing for class by completing assigned readings and ungraded practice exercises and creating high-quality deliverables are all fundamental parts of college-level coursework. However, the value of the processes of reading as learning, writing as learning, practice exercises as learning, etc. needs to be embodied for students to hold themselves accountable to doing work that is not turned in for a grade. Likewise, truly understanding the importance of process and the value of revision to create high-quality deliverables requires students to experience practice-based improvement in their work firsthand.
Administering a quiz at the beginning of class or setting aside time in class to discuss the assigned reading are some common ways professors signal the expectation that students come prepared to learn, but that alone does not teach students how to critically read or prepare. Suggesting students utilize campus resources like the Kogod School of Business’s Center for Professionalism and Communications or the Writing Center in the Academic Support and Access Center is good advice, but that alone does not teach students how to revise. Having a late work policy for large projects or final papers is good, but also consider the importance of enforcing a consistent late work policy for lower-stakes assignments. You might be less likely to experience students turning things in late, or at least attempting to turn things in late, if students experience firsthand the effect on their grade of being late at beginning of the semester assignments as opposed later in the semester.
Some ways to support the development of positive academic habits is by modeling critical analysis of assigned texts and integrating the giving of feedback and self-reflection as parts of the learning process. One tool I use to model different ways of critically assessing texts and reflection as a part of learning in my classroom is thinking routines. Thinking routines are activities that you can return to multiple times with different content as the focus to exercise the practice of critical thinking, evaluation of sources, and communication and reflection skills (Project Zero).
Some of my favorites include the Four Cs, where students are asked to find connections between the source and their lived experience, identify important concepts from the reading, challenge ideas they don’t agree with or feel are well argued, and explain what changes the author is trying to get the reader to make. When I introduce the Four Cs activity for the first time, I often talk about how we will be doing this activity over the duration of the course, and that reading to find answers to these questions is one way to interact with the assigned texts if they are struggling to see the point in doing the pre-work. Another thinking routine I often use is the reflective exercise of “I used to think… and now I think….” This simple framing device enables students to identify where they have expanded their understanding and changed their mind. It makes learning visible to students where it otherwise might not have been. Other approaches include scaffolding assignments to enable repetition of key skills across the entire semester (Sweetland Center for Writing).
Students have been conditioned to receive feedback throughout the entirety of their academic careers by receiving grades on assignments. The skill of giving feedback is often less familiar to students; yet, it is a valuable way of reinforcing learning. “Giver’s Gain” is a term used to describe the benefit students get from the process of evaluating a peer’s work (Eli Review Blog, 2017). While getting comments on their own work is often the most obvious benefit of having a draft to review before the final submission, students often miss that the giving of feedback is a learning process too. Being able to identify shortcomings in a peer’s work enables students to recognize the shortcomings in their own work and how they can then make revisions. This approach is used in many fields. It is the “critique” process in the arts, and it is why it is so useful to have students watch and evaluate each other’s presentations on projects rather than present with only the instructor(s) as the audience in mind.
Instructors who teach first-year writing courses often do this challenging teaching work consistently. However, as students take other classes while completing the first-year writing requirements or are sometimes unable to start their writing sequence until the spring semester, reinforcing positive academic habits is necessary in all first-semester coursework.
Start with low-stakes interpersonal skill development
Interpersonal skills, also referred to as soft skills, are a fundamental component of long-term student success. To succeed in college and beyond, students will need to be able to successfully work together in teams (CTRL). However, that doesn’t mean they all have the interpersonal skills to do that before they begin college. You can make the development of these skills easier for students to navigate (and easier on yourself as you are less likely to have to step in to play referee) if you provide ample low-stakes opportunities for students to work together.
Group work doesn’t have to be a high-stakes project with a single deliverable that is the primary driver of a student’s ultimate grade to be a valuable learning experience. It could be in-class activities to practice material as a warmup at the beginning of class. It could look like in-class projects where students work together to apply the course concepts and check their understanding of the material. It can look like peer review processes on independent projects. It could still look like a collaborative deliverable, but the stakes could be lowered by grading based on the completion of group work or contributions to the group, rather than students feeling the pressure of their final grade in the course ultimately depending on their classmates’ efforts. The goal should be for students to learn to navigate working through conflict or miscommunication, not to penalize them for not having fully developed those skills before beginning college.
Some ways I have implemented low-stakes interpersonal skill development include collaborative in-class activities. One approach to in-class group activities I have had success with implementing is collaborative slide activities to give students an opportunity to practice applying the content from the course while working as a team. After covering the material in a unit, I would break students into groups of 3-5 students and instruct them to work together for the duration of the class period on preparing a slide in a shared presentation file based on the prompt. The presentation file became a shared resource that I was able to use to assess class participation.
Bringing it all together
These strategies can take effort on the part of the instructor because high-quality teaching is challenging work. However, none of these strategies require loosening standards or accepting low-quality work. In fact, these strategies empower students to produce good-quality work because you will have better equipped them for it. You can maintain high expectations and hold firm on your boundaries regarding late work, academic integrity, and thoughtful production of assignments. By using these strategies to work with first-semester students, you can empower students to be successful in future semesters as well.
Author Profile
Alyssa Harben is an Instructor/Advisor in the Office of First Year Advising. She first worked with first-year college students in the spring of 2014 at California Polytechnic State University of San Luis Obispo. She received a graduate Certificate in College Teaching in 2019 and a PhD in Packaging from Michigan State University’s School of Packaging in 2021.
Resources and References
CTRL Faculty Resources. (n.d.). Teaching first year students.
CTRL Faculty Resources. (n.d.). The hidden curriculum: Helping students learn the ‘secret’ keys to success.
CTRL Faculty Resources. (n.d.). Supporting effective group projects and teamwork.
Eli Review Blog. (2017, March 28). Giver’s gain in peer learning.
Leamnson, R. (1999). Thinking about teaching and learning: Developing habits of learning with first year college and university students. Routledge.
Project Zero. (n.d.). Project Zero’s thinking routine toolbox. Harvard Graduate School.
Project Zero. (n.d.). The 4 Cs. Harvard Graduate School.
Project Zero. (2015). I used to think…now I think…. Harvard Graduate School.
Sweetland Center for Writing. (n.d.). Effective assignment sequencing for scaffolding learning. University of Michigan.