High-Impact Pedagogy in First-Year Seminars: A Practice to Address Developmental Education

« Back to Knowledge Center

Strong Start to Finish supported the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition’s efforts to engage in a large-scale qualitative research project, conducting an in-depth content analysis of first-year seminar syllabi. Knowing that first-year seminars only meet their full potential when continually evaluated for following the High Impact Practices (HIP) model and that research generally does not collect data on first-year seminar instructors’ pedagogical decisions, this study sought to fill a gap in the literature. The study fills this gap by collecting and analyzing first-year seminar syllabi from sections targeted to students in developmental education and those who were provisionally admitted for using high-impact practices and pedagogies.