Teaching First Year Students - Teaching Practices

Teaching Practices that Promote First-Year Student Success

1. Take attendance and learn students’ names.

2. Help students be responsible for their own learning.

3. Help students plan their activities in order to meet course expectations.

1. Take attendance and learn students’ names.

The major purpose for taking attendance is to send an important message to students: I know you, I notice whether you are in class, and it matters whether you come to class or not.

Attendance has been shown to be a reliable predictor of student success: “A meta-analysis of the relationship between class attendance in college and college grades reveals that attendance has strong relationships with both class grades and GPA. These relationships make class attendance a better predictor of college grades than any other known predictor of academic performance, including scores on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, high school GPA, study habits, and study skills" (Crede, Roch, & Kieszcynka, 2010, p. 1).

Take and grade attendance (see Strategies for Taking and Grading Attendance).
Create an online profile for yourself, require that students update their Moodle profile, and introduce themselves to each other online according to prompts you provide.
Learn students’ names and basic profiles (see Strategies for Learning Students’ Names).
Require students to make at least one 10-minute visit to office hours during the first six weeks of the term (faculty provide at least five office hours per week) — see Create a Poll for instructions on creating a sign-up page in Moodle or create a sign-up sheet in a Google doc. You can also use Zoom to hold virtual office hours online. For smaller classes, some faculty use Google calendar for this purpose (which offers the additional advantage of tracking the use of office hours, if required by department).

2. Help students be responsible for their own learning.

Student Role: Take responsibility for their own learning.

Instructor Role: Provide structure to help students take responsibility.

"No matter how charismatic and engaging we are, how much technology we leverage, how many classes we flip or how many pallets of rubrics we deploy, in the end, it’s still the students who have to do the learning. We may be able to make it easier to learn, cheaper to learn or more fun to learn, but students will still have to do the work." (E. Gilbert, Who is Responsible for Student Learning?)

Tools that help provide structure include:

Assignment checklist
Midterm self-check
- What grade am I making now, in this course?
- What grade do I want to make in the end?
- What do I need to do to make that grade?
Midterm course evaluations — see Transforming Midterm Evaluations into a Metacognitive Pause for suggestions on tailoring your questions to focus on students' understanding of their own learning processes.
Post-test self-check
- Am I happy with my grade?
- What’s a realistic amount of grade improvement I can achieve on my next exam?
- How should I prepare for the next test? Felder, R.M. (1999). Memo to students who are disappointed with their last test grade. Chemical Engineering Education, 33(2), 136–137. (See more from Felder).
Monitor student interactions with course resources and activities in Moodle by referring to activity logs or activity completion reports. Research reported in 2016 found that engagement with the LMS was a significant predictor of student success. Further research conducted by John Whitmer at Blackboard, also in 2016, showed a strong correlation between students checking their grades in the LMS and their performance in the course.

3. Help students plan their activities in order to meet course expectations.

Student Role: Review, understand, and make plans based on course syllabus, course calendar, learning outcomes.

Instructor Role: Communicate expectations clearly.

Provide a syllabus which communicates expectations and facilitates student planning.
Communicate expectations using multiple channels (e.g., consider providing a visual syllabus).
Design assignments using transparent design principles.

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