Freshman Year Research Articles

Information Scanning Impacts Nonmedical Drug Use Among College Students: A Longitudinal Study of Scanning Effects

ABSTRACT Health information that is acquired through information scanning has been shown to play an important role in shaping individual beliefs and health behavior. This study examines the direct and indirect effects of the breadth of scanning from media and interpersonal sources about two risk behaviors (nonmedical use of amphetamines and marijuana) on subsequent drug use behavior through changes to perceived norms. We test effects of scanning using a longitudinal online survey design with data collected at six-month intervals over three time points among 800 Israeli undergraduate students in their freshman year. Of the 800 respondents who participated in the first wave, 62.4% completed the second wave (N = 499), among which 347 (69.5%) completed a follow-up 6 months later. Results of cross-lagged structural equation models find that scanning information about amphetamines from interpersonal sources at 6 months predicted an increased likelihood of nonmedical use of amphetamines at 12-months. In addition, young adults who scanned information about marijuana from media sources at 6 months reported greater nonmedical marijuana use at 12 months. Breadth of scanning about marijuana from media sources mediated the relationship between perceived norms and marijuana use at 12 months. Results also showed indirect effects of scanning at baseline on nonmedical drug use at 12 months through scanning from the same source at 6 months. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of information scanning and perceived norms in shaping substance use behaviors, and suggest that scanning may serve as a potential early indicator of risk.

An exploratory study of 21st century skills of undergraduate education students: A comparison between freshman, second, and graduation years

ABSTRACT This study is an exploratory study aiming to add to the scarce research exploring the enhancement of 21st century skills across the undergraduate years of Education student. Data were collected from 329 undergraduates (96% females), who learned at Ashkelon Academic College, Israel. 103 students (31%) were at the beginning of the freshman year, 102 students (31%) were at the end of the second school year, and 123 students (38%) were at the end of the graduation and final school year. The 21st century skills were assessed using a 32 Likert-type item questionnaire about 21st century skills. Results indicated of positive relations between all 21st century skills, and between undergraduates` matriculation examination grades and all these skills, except for ICT. Significant differences in 21st century skills were found between freshman year and advanced years. 21st century skills mastery was higher in advanced years compared to freshman year. Educational implications are discussed.

Getting schooled in physics the hard way: A long journey to an inclusive pedagogy

Physics courses—and the lack of physics courses—had a huge impact on my academic career. I attended a high school that transitioned from coed to all girls during my freshman year. With the change, four things disappeared: boys, football, calculus, and physics. Three years later, when I applied to universities, two of my four applications were rejected. I was not qualified to apply, because I had not completed a physics course. As I sat in college Physics 1 on the first day of class, the professor asked us to raise our hands if we had not studied physics in high school. I raised my hand. Suddenly, panic struck me as I realized that not one of the other 400+ mostly male students had raised a hand. In that class I learned that physics teaching means direct lecture, notetaking, and occasional entertaining demonstrations. Not a good fit for a social woman from a very poor family in the East Los Angeles area. Working half time precluded joining study groups, so my struggle to learn physics was difficult and lonely. I succeeded primarily by sheer stubbornness and fear of failure. How I wish I had had fellow travelers on my path.

Abstract P074: A Cluster Randomized Trial Of An Mhealth Intervention To Promote Cardiovascular Health In Emerging Adults: Results Of The Nuyou Study

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) persists as the leading preventable cause of death in the US and worldwide. The American Heart Association (AHA) defines ideal cardiovascular health as the presence of: non-smoking, normal weight, adequate physical activity, healthy diet, normal blood pressure, normal fasting plasma glucose, and normal cholesterol. Only 45% of youth under 20 years old in the US exhibit five of the seven factors at ideal levels and that proportion plummets to 10% by age 40. Thus, novel strategies are needed to support primordial prevention of CVD via promotion of the seven health factors. Targeting young adults could stave off the alarming drop in cardiovascular health and contribute to healthier longevity. Objective: The NUYou trial was a two arm prospective cluster randomized trial to evaluate whether an mHealth intervention focused on cardiovascular health promotion improved cardiovascular health more than an active comparator in college students. Methods: Northwestern University Freshmen were cluster randomized by dormitory into two mHealth intervention groups: 1) Cardiovascular Health (CVH), addressing behaviors related to CVD risk; or 2) Whole Health (WH), addressing behaviors unrelated to CVD. Both groups received smartphone applications, co-designed with students to help them manage time, connect via social media, and report health behaviors weekly. The CVH group also received tailored self-monitoring features to track their risk behaviors. Cardiovascular health was assessed at the beginning of freshman, sophomore, and junior years. Health questionnaires, blood pressure, height, weight, glucose, and cholesterol were used to calculate the AHA’s Life’s Simple Seven (LSS) composite score (0-14, 14 being ideal health). Linear mixed models were used to compare CVD vs WH on LSS score. Results: Over 2 years, we recruited 302 participants (60% female). Participants were an average age of 18.1 (1.2) years and had a mean LSS score of 11.3 (1.4). Participant race was reported as, 28% Asian, 10% Black, 12% other/unknown/unreported, and 50% White. Ethnicity was reported as 12% Hispanic, 79% Non-Hispanic, and 9% unknown or unreported. There were no group, time, or group by time differences in LSS over 2-years. However, cholesterol increased as a function of time, by 7.39 mg/dL from Freshmen to Junior year and was not different by group. Conclusion: Despite using evidence-based behavior change techniques and employing a co-development approach with students, the groups did not differ on LSS over the 2-year intervention. The non-significant effects could be explained by high baseline LSS scores, the relatively short follow up time where a drop in LSS score would not be evident, or the absence of a human contact in the intervention. More research over a longer time span is needed to identify opportunistic time frames and strategies to intervene during young adulthood.

Bipolar Disorder: A Springboard to My Higher Self.

Bipolar Disorder: A Springboard to My Higher Self.

Class Rooms

Class Rooms

Pelatihan Dasar Kepemimpinan: Peran dan Kewajiban Mahasiswa di Universitas Bumigora

This public service is aim to give knowledge and understanding to students in Universitas Bumigora. This service activity is a student’s management leadership training for basic level. Students’ needs to understand that they have important role and responsibilities in societies and in the college; students are also needs to learn how to manage their selves; to identify leadership identities and to handle conflict. The method used in this public service is there stages; pre-test, workshop and post-test. The participants are students in Universitas Bumigora especially the freshman year. The result obtained is to open horizons of thought that students’ part in the future is important not only to themselves but also to the region, further to our country. Therefore, given knowledge in this student’s management leadership training for basic level expand students understanding in the college and in the community.

An instant world: truth and reality

Today, technology allows us to capture reality in an extremely crude way. Consider, for instance, the images derived from micro cameras that invade our inter bodies for medical diagnosis. In this context, there is no valuable argument against the truth. Back in the Architecture PhD freshman year, a group of students were asked to conceive an idea of a chair for an art class. It was a rather free proposal; yet all of them constructed a small, scaled model, and the objective was to photograph it on different urban sites. One of the proposals chose to use no software tricks in the pictures, based on the conviction that the truth was, like in Pilate’s view, something one might question buy cannot antagonize. In due course, this issue of SOPHIA gives us a chance to review this true story, based on real events in light of other perspectives, coming across with the notion of how ‘true’ it is that the specialised architectural journals, schoolbooks themselves, including those of a high scientific level, are (...) channels that tend to transform the spatiotemporal notion of architecture and landscape into that of signs, the notion of reality into that of a photographic representation of reality. (...)

Fotografia como recurso didático nas aulas de Geografia

The teaching of Physical Geography in schools is a challenge for teachers, either due to the difficulty in the initial training process, caused by a separate curriculum in closed subjects, which fragment the contents and make it difficult to understand the scientific knowledge, or by the lack of pedagogical knowledge, impairing the teaching-learning process of the contents. Thus, we sought to develop, through the actions of the Institutional Program of Teaching Initiation Scholarship (PIBID), edition 2018-2020, of the subproject Geography, a work that stimulated the eyes of the freshman year students of an Integrated High School to exercise the knowledge acquired in class on the subject of relief. The work consisted of guiding and encouraging students to observe the landscape of the areas where they transit and register, through photography, the forms of relief and its modifying actions, especially those of anthropic origin. The students were encouraged to analyze the images and share the results with their classmates. The activity aimed to develop the students' perception of the landscape around them and improve their analysis capability, promoting significant educational action, as well as providing the developing teachers with a better understanding of Physical Geography and the teaching-learning process.

An Experimental Study on EFL Teacher Trainees’ Opinions about English as a Lingua Franca

The present study investigates three different groups of Freshman year EFL teacher trainees’ opinions regarding the English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Perspective in ELT. A quantitative quasi-experimental research design with repeated measures was used to investigate the initial opinions of the participants, and how their opinions changed after semester-long target culture native speaker-oriented class practices versus intercultural ELF-oriented practices as part of their Listening and Pronunciation course. A total of 83 students participated in the study. To collect data, a six-item mini questionnaire was used as pre and post survey immediately before and after the experiment. The results indicated that the teacher trainees under investigation favored native English varieties over nonnative ones while at the same time accepting the international lingua franca role of English in today’s globalized world. The three different treatments they took during the experiment caused some changes in their initial opinions as will be explained in detail in the coming sections of the paper. The overall findings of the study support previous research on language learners’ opinions about and attitudes towards different varieties of English, and their use in English lessons and course materials

PH Professional Network: From Patient to Provider: How My Diagnosis Makes Me a Better Nurse

PH Professional Network: From Patient to Provider: How My Diagnosis Makes Me a Better Nurse

Review: Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia, by Benjamin Arnberg

Book Review| January 01 2022 Review: Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia, by Benjamin Arnberg Benjamin Arnberg, Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia (New York: Routledge, 2020). 250 pp., 13 illustrations, $155 (hardback), ISBN: 9781003002024 Ryan Bittinger Ryan Bittinger rbittinger.therapy@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Autoethnography (2022) 3 (1): 122–125. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2022.3.1.122 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ryan Bittinger; Review: Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia, by Benjamin Arnberg. Journal of Autoethnography 1 January 2022; 3 (1): 122–125. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2022.3.1.122 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Autoethnography Search I have read and enjoyed Arnberg’s Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia amidst preparing for and completing an international move from Scotland to California—during the COVID-19 pandemic, no less. As I was folding laundry in my post-international travel quarantine, I contemplated how to write this review. Folding my brightly colored underwear reminded me of my own undergraduate campus experiences, especially as some of those garments were bought online about twelve years ago during my first term of freshman year. This was a formative queer moment for me—finally having my own address, I could order underwear that made me feel sexy and queer without possible parental scrutiny. Like me, many queer people experience transitioning to college campuses as a formative time during the development of their sexual identity. Queer Campus Climate highlights moments and experiences that inform the lives of queer students and academics. This book focuses on witnessing instead of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Designing their own curriculum: How youth co-constructed a dance team that opposed traditional student–school relationships

This article draws from a two-year ethnography at an urban public high school to analyze how high school students came together around a shared love for dance to create a youth-led affinity space. The high school students, Black youth in their freshman year of high school, navigated the complexities of creating a dance team and collaboratively composing dances, which in this article are theorized as multimodal texts. The analysis reveals how the student dancers practiced vulnerability, engaged in play as radical praxis, and were seen as creative cultural producers within school. While youth of color live rich literate and culturally productive lives, their literacies are often obscured or devalued within school. Curriculum and pedagogies tend to prescribe specific ways of making meaning that limit how youth can express themselves by dictating language, literacies, and body movement. Thus, this article illustrates how youth-led spaces can create opportunities to nurture youth’s literate identities and reimagine relationships with each other and school.

Student Confidence, Success, and Retention: The Impact of Military Experience on the College Lives of Korean Males

This qualitative study was designed to investigate the experiences of Korean male college students within the context of higher education and the military. Twenty Korean male undergraduate students, recently discharged from compulsory military service, participated in this study. The data for the study were collected through semi-structured interviews, each lasting approximately 70-90 minutes. Data analysis was based on Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory. Findings indicate that these students are more academically motivated as compared to their own freshman year. During their term of military service, they have experienced goal commitment, leadership, and diverse relationships. Upon returning to school, they exhibited a developed set of strengths including a sense of confidence, perseverance, and courage. This attributes significantly contributed to their academic motivation and potentially to their success on campus. For Korean males, it was a challenge to complete their military duty; however, this unique experience gave them strength and helped them to establish their own academic and social lives. This study suggests that specific college experiences that serve to enhance students’ self-confidence should be continuously offered to encourage academic motivation in students. Furthermore, this study is significant in that it recognizes successful academic transitions made by Korean male students and documents the potential educational implications of mandatory military experiences.

Division I student-athlete special admits: Who are they? An exploratory study of demographics and graduation rates within a single conference

ABSTRACT Currently, the NCAA does not track the academic outcomes of student-athlete special admits. This study surveyed multiple institutions within a Division I FCS Conference regarding their student-athlete special admit population. Demographic aspects, as well as progress towards graduation, or lack thereof based on entry into the professional leagues, dismissal from team for academic reasons, dismissal from team for reasons other than academic, voluntarily withdrawing from school, and/or transferring to another school were collected. Findings showed the majority of student-athlete special admits (55%) graduated within six years from their initial institution, while only 5% were dismissed for academic reasons. Special admits with the poorest educational outcomes were those who were redshirted their freshman year. Results suggest student-athlete special admits differ from the regular student-athlete population in regard to academic best practices (freshman redshirting) and from regular student-athletes and non-athletes in regard to demographics with higher six-year graduation rates.

As Good as Goldsmith: Fostering Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Andrea Goldsmith was one of those students who was interested in everything, and like many high school graduates, she didn’t know what she was going to study in college. A gap year spent traveling made her even more interested in politics and languages, and when she began her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, she thought seriously about majoring in political science. Her father, though, advised her to enter the engineering school, reasoning that it was much easier to transfer out of than into engineering with its prerequisites, heavy course loads, and harsh grading. She followed his advice—he was, after all, a mechanical engineering professor at the school—and declared engineering math as her major.

Contrasting 4 Year Outcomes Associated With Introduction to Management Courses

Management faculty members have had a longstanding interest in the design of the Introduction to Management Course as it presents an opportune point to provide students with the foundational skills for success in their Management Studies. Since many Management majors take these courses during their freshman year in the university, the courses are, intentionally or not, also settings for helping students transition to the university both academically and socially. This paper reports on a study of the 4-year outcomes associated with this potential of Introduction to Management courses to help with students’ transition into university-level studies. Specifically, it contrasts 4-year graduation outcomes among three different Introduction to Management courses taken by a freshman business student cohort of a large, public, university. The study results show a course that focused on life skill building was associated with better 4-year graduation outcomes than theory-driven and business overview classes. Contrary to expectations, the study indicated that there were no significant differences among students enrolled in the classes in terms of other important student characteristics known to impact graduation rates, including underrepresented minority (URM) and first-generation status, SAT or ACT scores, self-reported GPA, and exposure to university-level URM student success and achievement programs.

The interaction between Greek affiliation and religiosity on problem drinking in college students

Objective: Greek affiliation is associated with increased problem drinking in college, while religiosity typically offers protective benefits. The current study examined the interaction between Greek status and religiosity-both public (e.g., religious attendance) and private (e.g., prayer frequency)-on problem drinking. Participants and Methods: Undergraduates (N = 477) completed an online survey battery in late spring 2019, at the end of their freshman year. Results: Analyses focused on prayer frequency were not significant; however, the two-way interaction between Greek affiliation and religious attendance was significant. There was no difference in problem drinking across Greek and non-Greek students when religious attendance was low. As frequency of religious attendance increased, Greek students engaged in increased problem drinking compared to non-Greek students. Conclusions: Greek involvement may undermine the protective authority of religious practices on problem drinking, in part through moral licensing, whereby morally sound behaviors (i.e., religious attendance) may justify past or future problem drinking.

Portuguese Medical Students' Interest for Science and Research Declines after Freshman Year.

The integration of scientific research into medical curricula remains insufficient despite its advantages for medical students’ professional development and the advancement of medicine. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of first-year medical course attendance on medical students’ attitudes and perceptions towards scientific research and clinical practice, while also assessing the contribution of sociodemographic and academic factors. Two hundred and thirteen medical students self-administrated a questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of the first school year. Their responses were compared and two regression models were calculated to assess factors influencing students’ attitudes and perceptions. After freshman year, students displayed significantly lower positive attitudes towards science and research. Their motivation to perform research and to integrate it into the curriculum also decreased, while the importance attributed to research skills for clinical practice increased. Motivation to perform research and negative attitudes were positively and negatively associated with grade point average (GPA), respectively. Female students and those who attended public secondary schools attributed greater importance to communication skills. This study reinforces the need to early develop research skills and positive attitudes in medical students, motivating them to become physician-scientists. Additional follow-up studies may offer further contributions to the integration of research into medical curricula.

Phonological Analysis of Errors in the Consonant Cluster System Encountered by Saudi EFL Learners

This study investigates the pronunciation difficulty of selected English consonant clusters (CCs) encountered by Saudi EFL learners. The sample consisted of 134 female Saudi EFL students in their freshman year in the English Department at Najran University. Two instruments were used: a pronunciation test that assessed participants’ CC pronunciations in the onset and coda positions and a questionnaire that explored participants’ attitudes towards their CC pronunciations. This study provides detailed data on the participants’ pronunciation difficulties using Optimality Theory (OT). The results showed that the participants encountered CC pronunciation difficulties in both the onset and coda positions. However, most errors occurred in the coda position, especially for the four-consonant pattern (-CCCC). Participants used different strategies to simplify their CC pronunciations: epenthesis, deletion, substitution, or some combination thereof. Questionnaire data indicated that the participants attributed their pronunciation difficulties to inadequate knowledge of the pronunciation rules, insufficient language instruction, and native-language influence. The participants proffered some remedies to their difficulties, which included doing more pronunciation drills and offering a new course focused primarily on correct pronunciation. OT analysis revealed that onset clusters were mainly influenced by L1 ranking constraints whereas coda clusters were more influenced by universal Markedness constraints. OT indicated that the tendency to satisfy Markedness constraints over the Faithfulness constraints led the participants to use the above-mentioned simplification strategies.