Your Department, CSU, Chico

Research Focused on First-Year Students: Classroom Ethnographies

The FYE program stays in touch with first-year students’ needs, concerns, and insights, investigating their experiences through qualitative research.  Trained student ethnographers conduct IRB-approved classroom observations, formal and informal interviews, and case studies of student volunteers. 

Information gained from this research is used to inform both program development and faculty development efforts.  Current lore about first-year students indicates that they prefer to plug into technology rather than hold face-to-face conversations with others; our research consistently refutes this finding.  First-year students want to make significant connections with one another, with faculty, with staff, and with members of the Chico community.  They have difficulty learning prior to establishing a social network that provides them with a sense of belonging.
Contradicting both popular and scholarly claims about their Internet addictions, they prefer “snail mail” to other kinds of contact from home.

Our local research efforts reveal how much first-year students need explicit information about teacher expectations.  Because classrooms in college may not look very different from classrooms in high school, many first-year students initially misread the challenges of college courses, underestimating both the amount and complexity of requirements.  National research indicates that these students benefit from posted cumulative course grades after midterms because they need the “reality check” of seeing their grades in print.  Local research supports this finding; our first-year students inform us that they do not calculate their own grades or track their grade progress in high school—and they count on extra-credit options to “save” them if they flounder in a course.  Faculty can assist first-year students by emphasizing the importance of all course requirements, including reading requirements, and by disabusing students of the notion that a safety net of extra-credit options will appear at the end of the term.

From Summer Orientation on, first-year students find that some of their most important and encouraging experiences occur when individual faculty members take the time to talk with new students one-to-one or in small groups.  They appreciate faculty members who require office hour visits and who help them understand the differences between the high school and the college contexts. 

Faculty members who want to spend more time working with and learning about first-year students might consider joining the Faculty Mentor Program through Housing.  This program aims to provide quality contact between students-in-residence on our campus and faculty members who meet with them for campus and community activities.

To learn more about first-year students at CSU, Chico, contact the FYE Program for a calendar of presentation & discussion options offered for all faculty and staff; these informal workshops provide faculty and staff with information based on both national and local research.