1. Introduction | 2. Identifying Concerns | 3. Studying and Exploring Measures to Address Concerns
4. Recommendations | 5. Measuring the Impacts | 6. Appendices

The Advisory Committee on the First-year Experience was created in May 2005 to advise the Vice-President (Academic and Research) on shorter and longer term measures to enhance the first-year experience at Mount Allison. Committee members appointed by the vice-president were: Alex Fancy (Arts), Loralea Michaelis (Social Sciences), Bob Hawkes (Sciences), John Perkin (Dean of Students), Eileen Herteis (Director, Purdy Crawford Teaching Centre), Kyle Hill (student), and Mark Blagrave (Chair). When Dr Michaelis went on leave, Erin Steuter replaced her as the active Social Sciences representative. The committee met twelve times, and also conducted a number of public consultations as described below. Moral and funding support from the Vice-President (Academic) along with a grant from the Chancellor’s Special Projects Fund have helped the committee enormously.

The report that follows attempts to summarize concerns expressed to the committee regarding the current state of first-year studies at Mount Allison, and to reflect aspirations expressed to the committee by faculty members and students alike. Having heard from the campus community and from invited experts, and having studied measures in place elsewhere to ensure an excellent first-year experience, the committee recommends, below, a series of measures intended to be implemented as an integrated set. We believe that these measures, phased in over the next three years, will guarantee our entering students an enhanced sense of coherence and purpose, a solid grounding in critical thinking and writing, and a truly stimulating start on their liberal education at Mount Allison.

Student focus-groups held in March 2006 identified several key areas where the first-year experience should be improved. These included: the academic advising of first-year students and the timing of registration; the fostering of critical thinking skills in first-year courses, and the introduction in first-year courses of the methods and rigour of study and exploration that serve for later courses; the development of listening and note-taking skills; the coordination, planning, and publicizing of events on campus; the development of oral communication skills in first-year classes; the effectiveness of distribution requirements; and the sense of community with the town and the local area.

A questionnaire that was made available on-line in March to all students revealed, overall, a reasonable average level of satisfaction with the experience of the first year. About 50% of respondents reported that they felt that their individual courses complemented one another, that they had felt they were part of a community of learners, that they had adequate opportunity to work on written skills, and that they could make connections between in-class and out-of-class activities.

It is worth noting, though, that while the mean satisfaction level expressed in the survey was good, some 80 of the 403 respondents reported that they felt that their courses were not sufficiently inter-related, and 59 students reported that they had not felt themselves to be part of a community of learners, and 88 students reported that they had not been able to make connections between in-class and out-of-class experiences, while 68 students reported that they had not had adequate opportunity to work on written communication skills. The committee believes that these numbers indicate that the experience is by no means universally effective as it stands.

In addition, those respondents who "agreed" that academic advising was adequate barely outnumbered those who “disagreed,” suggesting that there is considerable work to be done there; and those who “agreed” that they had opportunity to reflect on learning styles barely outnumbered those who "disagreed." The number of students who "disagreed" that they had had opportunity to develop oral skills was a little greater than those who "agreed" -- a response that might be attributed to the size of some first-year classes, and one that suggests that measures to address this would be in order.

In March 2006 the committee held open workshop sessions with faculty members to discuss the list of in-course objectives and to discuss possibilities for the use of student learning portfolios as part of a first-year programme.

While attendance was small at these sessions, there was support for the list of identified objectives for first-year courses (above). Some participants wondered whether all courses were to be expected to address all objectives or whether there might be specific selected outcomes appropriate to specific courses. Discussions about “coherence” raised the idea of identifying each year a theme of common interest (keying this to course readings and assignments and to “extra-curricular” programming). There was considerable support for the idea of cooperation among departments or programmes in identifying inter-related courses in different subject areas and in capitalizing on the potential relationships. There was also discussion around issues related to academic advising, including discussion of the possibility of establishing templates to assist with effective advising, the role that pre-identified groupings of mutually-complementary courses might play in simplifying course selection, the inevitable time-demands that would be exerted by re-implementing full-scale first-year advising, and the pros and cons of September registration for first-year students.

In its internal discussions of learning portfolios, the committee saw considerable potential for students’ demonstrating contributions in the areas of creation, communication and dissemination (writing, oral presentation, teaching their peers), and service. Members observed that portfolios could also develop in students skills of self-assessment, self-marketing, and metacognition as well as giving them something tangible and unique-to-Mount-Allison to take away (a kind of documentary equivalent to some institutions’ trademark rings.) The sessions with faculty members on the possible use of student learning portfolios in the first year recognized that, while learning portfolios can provide a way of highlighting the development of meta-cognitive abilities and can afford students a worthwhile vehicle for reflection, it is less clear how first-year portfolios, outside of possible uses in individual courses, could serve as an overarching means for achieving coherence among a group of courses or between courses and extracurricular activities without the appointment of an administrator/supervisor and without some system of (grade-based) incentives.

In late August 2005, the committee, with the financial assistance of the Vice-President (Academic), invited Drs Shannon Murray from UPEI and Russ Hunt from St Thomas University to animate, during the Purdy Crawford Teaching Centre’s Teaching and Learning Day, a discussion of models for first-year programming. Dr Murray described three different approaches to enhancing first-year studies at UPEI: the University 100/103 method, where students develop communication, study, research, and thinking skills and receive a general orientation to the university; the Arts 100 method, where a small number of students study in interdisciplinary seminars built on the Tufts model; and the UPEI First-year Advantage which links three existing courses and sees cohorts of 25 students working through the allied courses together. Dr Hunt characterized St Thomas’s “Aquinas Programme” as a pilot programme that had been in the piloting phase for ten years. Students (in groups no larger than 36) enroll in three linked courses that explore a common theme from three different disciplinary perspectives, and that also draw on events on campus outside of classes. The guiding idea behind the Aquinas programme was that if one could create learning communities the rest of an excellent first-year experience would follow. The programme, however, is entirely dependent on individuals’ willingness and availability to teach in it, and students’ programmes in many cases are not flexible enough to allow room for the three interlinked courses. Enrolments have dwindled over the years.

Both visiting experts addressed the pros and cons of the alternative measures of mandating a common course for all first-year students and linking already-existing courses, and both confessed to a preference for the latter. They also noted that only very small numbers of students had, as yet, benefited from their learning-communities programmes, and they advised against piecemeal measures.

Thanks to the Chancellor’s Special Projects Fund, the committee was able, in March 2006, to bring in Dr David Garcia from Ithaca College and Dr Philip Smith from The University of Prince Edward Island for a half-day session on first-year seminars and on service learning. Faculty members from all three faculties attended, as did the Vice-President (Academic), the three deans, and a number of invited students.

Dr Garcia described efforts at Ithaca College to implement a college-wide seminar requirement to break down the barriers among the college’s five schools which have developed quite independently, historically, in the virtual absence of an overall institutional plan. He noted that the pilot programme for the college-wide seminar has identified a number of issues, ranging from the pitfalls of trying to do too much in one course, through the challenges of orchestrating service-learning in a small community and the need for faculty development in preparation for delivering a common seminar, to the challenges of changing the offered themes. Within Ithaca’s School of Humanities and Science, a seminar programme has operated longer and more successfully, with class size at about 25 students per instructor. Potential seminar-leaders apply to have their courses approved as a Humanities and Sciences First-year Seminar, demonstrating how their proposed course meets a number of identified objectives that include the development of critical thinking and writing capabilities, discussion of issues of transition to university, provision of active learning opportunities, and encouragement of tolerance of other perspectives. The range of course titles, Dr Garcia reported, can lead to unbalanced enrolments. He identified the need to find an alternative to "themes" as a way to describe any seminar approach that Mount Allison’s committee might recommend (to avoid uneven enrolments and "pet-projecting" &c.) Naming the goals, he said, is preferable to dictating the syllabus.

Dr Smith outlined some of the potentials for involving senior students in a seminar approach. UPEI’s Arts Seminars, which are modeled after seminars operating for many years at Tufts, provide academic credit both for the fourth-year students (Arts 400) who design and lead them and for the first-year students (Arts 101) who enroll in them. For the first-year students, the credit is for one term’s course (equivalent to Mount Allison’s 3 credits); for the designer/deliverers the credit is the equivalent of Mount Allison’s 6 credits. Grading is pass/fail, with clear standards for success discussed and articulated at the outset. Students begin with chiefly free-writing exercises, but progress to more complex and formal assignments. Dr Smith reported that student seminar leaders are far less likely to become narrowly discipline-focused than are regular members of faculty, making the seminars truly interdisciplinary in their approach. Seminars are led by pairs of senior students. Concerns over students’ delivering (albeit under faculty supervision) courses that are taken for credit by other students arise from time to time, but student ratings of instructors are typically very high. Dr Smith reported that, regrettably, only a very few seminars are offered at his institution in any given year.

With regard to community service learning, Dr Smith observed that, on the basis of his experience in a first-year Psychology class, service learning is best left as an option for students. Other attendees added that such learning is perhaps most effective at levels beyond the first year.

In their more general sharing of experiences regarding the improvement of the first-year experience, these two experts emphasized the importance of mounting a multi-pronged approach, a menu of measures, integrating each with a whole coordinated programme. In other words, seminars should not be a token or isolated measure. No single measure should be expected to “do it all.” They also stressed the importance of making recommendations that encourage institutional/cultural change to a new way of doing things that will become the new norm (rather than piecing something together, trying out bits). Any piloting or phasing-in should, they suggested, happen with a clear sense of what the end goals are and what the bigger longer-term picture is. Drs Smith and Garcia agreed with the stipulation made by attendees at their session that new measures should only be added as existing pressures can be subtracted: first-year programming requirements should not be a net add-on to existing requirements. Both speakers underlined the need for devoting resources to faculty development if a new order is to take root. They also stressed the need to do something integrated and imaginative that differentiates the Mount Allison first-year experience from any other.

The questionnaire for students, which was completed in March by 403 respondents (marking an excellent participation rate of nearly 20% of the entire student body), asked respondents to indicate whether they felt they would have benefited from a range of possible programming measures mooted as examples. Three-hundred and six out of 403 students liked the idea of interdisciplinary seminars; 305 out of 403 liked the idea of an academic resource centre; 305 out of 403 liked the idea of application through service; and 263 out of 403 liked the idea of complementary clusters of first-year courses. Other proposed measures were less enthusiastically received. For student portfolios, the “yeas” outnumbered the “nays” by only a little bit, and for independent studies the margin was even smaller. [see appendix 1]

Student Focus Groups provided the committee with a number of excellent suggestions for measures for improvement, as well as with interesting responses to hypothetical remedial measures that were posed.

The committee agreed, early in its deliberations, on two general guiding principles. The first was that whatever programmes were suggested for the enhancement of the first-year experience were to be accessible to all Mount Allison first-year students. All advice from other institutions has been that any sense of elitism born of limiting participation in a special first-year programme is potentially fatal to such a programme. Fortunately, the small size of Mount Allison affords us the luxury of treating all of our students as “elite.” The second principle was that all such programmes should be delivered by regular members of faculty (or, where necessary, by a combination of regular faculty members and persons with a long-term relationship with the university—persons on ongoing part-time appointments, for example.) If the measures recommended below are to be effective they must be embraced as part of the core mission of the university, as evidenced by the devotion of regular staff resources to them.

The committee studied measures in place at a variety of institutions large and small, Canadian and American, including models that prescribe a common course or series of courses designed to provide students with a background in the foundational principles of Western civilization, and models that concentrate on development of basic study skills and personal development issues. We believe that the best model for Mount Allison is one that focuses on “intents” rather than “contents” and that stresses higher-order critical thinking abilities. A made-for-Mount-Allison solution, moreover, should take advantage of the institution’s small size and concomitant potential as a community of learners, its past and potential as a liberal education institution, and the rich experiences it offers its students outside of the classroom through such means as visiting speakers, opportunities for community involvement, exhibitions, concerts, and performances.

The recommendations that follow are offered as an integrated slate. Although they may have to be phased in over a period of years (and we make some recommendations for this), the committee feels that they ought not to be broken up or settled for piecemeal.

To address concerns about writing and numeracy skills among first-year students, and to support those students and their instructors in the development of such skills, the committee recommends that a Centre to Support Academic Literacy be established. The centre, we believe, should be staffed initially by two professionals with expertise in writing-across-the-curriculum – one, a director, with a PhD in rhetoric/writing, and the other, a staff member, with a master’s degree and experience with teaching writing-across-the-curriculum and in training student writing-tutors—and it should be housed in an academic building, preferably the library. As resources permit, a staff member with experience in developing numeracy skills should be added to the centre’s staff. Experience with the fundamentals of the teaching of English as a Second Language would be an asset for the writing staff member. Student assistants would be trained as writing tutors by the centre’s professionals.

The committee does not believe that a system of testing the literacy and numeracy skills of incoming students and then implementing remediation where necessary, such as is in place at some other institutions, is a productive means of developing students’ abilities. Rather, we believe that active publicity about the centre during orientation week and throughout the year, coupled with self-referrals by students as they work on assignments, encouragement by teachers, visits by the centre’s staff to first-year classes, and perhaps the availability of evening workshops and a self-diagnostic test would serve our students well. Faculty members would be encouraged to consult with personnel at the centre regarding the effective design of writing assignments and best practices for providing grading feedback on writing assignments. The centre might also play a role in training marking assistants.

The committee believes that the director of the centre should report directly to the Vice-President (Academic), and that the centre should, on any “organizational chart,” be parallel to the Purdy Crawford Teaching Centre.

The committee believes that the centre should be staffed and operational by September 2007, and hopes that the Vice-President (Academic) and the Vice-President (External) might cooperate in securing the funding necessary for it.

The committee recommends that an enhanced first-year academic advising system be instituted to help ensure both coherence and variety in students’ academic programmes and to facilitate their adjustment to university studies, as well as providing an individual human academic face for the university from the outset.

On the advice of the students who participated in our focus groups, we recommend asking faculty members to volunteer to make contact with incoming students over the summer to help them frame questions they might have and to help answer such questions.

Although the committee believes that the ideal process would see first-year students registering in September, we recognize student, staff, and faculty concerns over such a measure. Incoming students, we believe, should continue to be allowed to “pre-register” over the summer months, but all incoming students should meet, in September, in groups of not more than twenty, with a faculty adviser who would provide those students who have not registered with general guidance in selecting courses and would confirm with those who have pre-registered that their assumptions and the likely reality match up. Endorsement of a student’s programme by their adviser would be required to validate their registration. First-year courses, consequently, would have to remain “open” to registration by first-year students until the end of the period for adding courses.

Following their initial meeting with their adviser, students would be free to choose to arrange further meetings with their adviser in the early days of term. All first-year students would also meet with their adviser in November and January; and they would continue to be attached to that adviser until such time as they have selected a Major and thus begun to work with a programme adviser (usually at the end of their second year of study).

We believe that the deans’ office is the logical seat of responsibility for academic advising, and we hope that the deans would encourage participation by faculty members in first-year advising, being sure to document (in an official letter of thanks, perhaps) such service as it is a valued function of the academic guidance of students that forms part of every faculty member’s professional responsibilities. A group of about 35 advisers should be adequate to begin the programme.

The committee believes that students’ orientation to the university and to the community and their ability to make informed academic decisions would also be helped by the implementation, during orientation week [or, if necessary, during the first two days of regular classes], of a series of “showcase mini-classes” mounted by every discipline that offers 1000-level courses, with these classes being geared to approaching a local subject from a discipline-specific perspective. Students would sample these classes to help them confirm their course selections at the same time as they gained some perspective on their new locale.

To ensure that first-year students have some time to reflect on their registration decisions, the committee recommends that the period during which courses can be added be extended for first-year students. One-and-a-half weeks into term would seem reasonable.

Recognizing the challenging logistics involved in implementing recommendations 3 and 4, the committee recommends that these measures be planned to take effect in June 2007.

To assist and encourage departments in addressing these goals, we recommend that the administration earmark funding for enhancement of first-year courses, and that departments be invited to submit to the Vice-President (Academic) requests for funding to help them develop their first-year courses by (for example) offering tutorials, field trips, service learning initiatives, inviting guest speakers, or hiring student assistants to facilitate, among other things, the offering of additional writing and critical thinking exercises. The committee also hopes that it will be possible to restore initiatives to develop leadership, activism, and community engagement among our students through such tested means as a certificate programme and a speakers’ series.

We believe that these measures to enhance the effectiveness and congruence of first-year course offerings can be initiated as early as this summer (2006).

The committee believes that Mount Allison’s small size and its already-teeming extra-curricular schedule provide a unique opportunity for the development of an enriched and integrated community of learners, and we recommend that the university community develop a coordinated and orchestrated approach to event-programming and the design of syllabuses for 1000-level courses, by relating both to a commonly-supported theme that is identified annually.

The theme, we suggest, could be chosen through an open “competition” decided by community vote in the spring of each year (for the subsequent year), with proposals for themes to be sponsored by at least three members of faculty, representing each of the three faculties, and to include proposed approaches to the theme (guest speakers, symposia, conferences, concerts, exhibitions, performances, common text to be read &c).
Themes should be broad and accessible from multiple perspectives—for example: perception, the environment, memory, the constitution of “good” citizenship, originality, food, ontology, numbers, taxonomies, rhythm, &c.

Once the theme is decided on, instructors of 1000-level courses would be encouraged to tailor their syllabuses to take account of it in some way, and to capitalize on connections with out-of-class events. Some of the advantages that the committee saw in identifying pairs of complementary courses could be realized through this measure since, in this way, a first-year student might on any given day be exposed to dialogue among a variety of discipline-specific takes on the theme as well as to events outside the classroom that also bear on it, providing a continuous experience and encouraging critical reflection.

Sponsors of events would be invited to have them earmarked and publicized, where appropriate and well in advance, as part of this integrated programme.

The committee recognizes that this measure will involve a considerable cultural shift, and that it will require a more cooperative approach to event planning and advertising than is currently the case. We recommend that the first “competition” occur in the late fall of 2006.

In light of recommendation 8, above, and in order to ensure that every first-year student has at least one academic experience that is in a small group and that takes account of the societal role of university studies and the ways in which we come to “know,” the committee recommends that a common 1000-level “critical explorations” course (to be offered in multiple sections) be developed, with a view to having every first-year student enroll in the course. (Transfer students would be encouraged, but not required, to do so.)

We believe that further study of this measure and the means for its implementation should be undertaken by an implementation committee during the academic year 2006-07, with a view to piloting a number of sections of such a course by January 2008. Our current view is that this course should be offered in multiple sections sufficient to keep enrolments in each section to a maximum of 30 students (between 20 and 25 sections, then, would be required.) Instructors would approach the year’s identified common theme (see above) from the perspective with which they are most comfortable, perhaps inviting colleagues from other disciplines to visit to facilitate some class sessions. All sections would share a set of common learning objectives but not a common syllabus. Learning objectives would include the development of critical thinking and writing skills, consideration of the role of the university and its disciplines in society, and consideration of learning styles. The committee believes that senior students could be very helpful as teaching assistants/ tutorial leaders in making this initiative work, at the same time as they could benefit from involvement.

Several times during the course of its deliberations the committee ran up against the question of the current distribution requirements. It seemed to us that some of the measures we would recommend might serve, in a less artificial and imposed way, the same purpose as the current requirements for distribution—namely, to ensure a sampling of disciplinary perspectives in which one complements another. It also occurred to us that some of the current bulges in enrolment in 1000-level courses might be the product of our current requirements for distribution and that a different approach to distribution requirements might help address issues of class-size and enrolment management too.

As a consequence, we recommend that Senate be asked to charge a committee with the task of examining and recommending on “distribution requirements.”