Freshman Seminar: A New Orientation

By: Robert D. Cohen

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Synopsis: The competition for students is growing among colleges and universities, leading administrators and student personnel professionals to ask what they can do to recruit and retain their students without lowering academic standards. The Freshman Seminar is one answer: it is a full-semester course designed to train would-be students in the skills they will need to survive in a student's world. Remedial courses alone are not sufficient; there are a host of meta-academic activities to be mastered, among them note taking, test taking, class participation, interacting with instructors, and developing realistic attitudes towards learning. The authors, initiators and experienced teachers in Hunter College's Freshman Seminar Program, describe the rationale for such a course, as well as its value. Their step-by-step approach to establishing and teaching a freshman seminar details the fundamentals of curriculum design and teaching methods and describes specific instructional material for classroom use—lesson plans, games, attitude inventories, and role playing. This is a comprehensive and practical guidebook for the college administrator who wants to reduce student attrition and for the student personnel professional who will implement such a program.