Sharing Responsibility for Engaging First-Year Students

George D. Kuh
Center for Postsecondary Research
Indiana University Bloomington USA

Student engagement is related to a host of desired outcomes of college – achievement, satisfaction, and persistence to name a few.  The purpose of this workshop is to review the intellectual and empirical foundations of student engagement and examine in depth strategies for promoting greater levels of student engagement by first year students.  The workshop will be divided into three segments. 

In the first hour, I will first summarize the body of work done over the past 50 years that point to the value of engagement to learning, some of the recent studies that show benefits for different types of students, and some of the programs in place at high performing institutions in the United States. 

The next segment will be spent in small working groups organized around interest themes.  Participants will discuss promising programs and practices that focus on issues ranging from what are effective approaches to working with particular groups of students such as first generation and low income students to programmatic interventions such as learning communities and first-year seminars. 

The final hour will be use to distill common themes and discuss how to address challenges in implementing, sustaining, and assessing the impact of first-year initiatives.