Defining Excellence and Innovation in America's Community Colleges: A Study of Best Practices in First Year Seminars that lead to Student Success

This study was conducted to investigate the growing concern that students
graduating from United States’ high schools are not prepared to enter college with the
requisite skills to be successful. President Obama’s Graduation Initiative coupled with the
weak performance of high-school graduates on college readiness examinations have led
to a focus on first-year seminars as an important tool for advancing the completion
agenda. These seminars are being used in a variety of ways to help students succeed by
preparing them for the academic rigors of college coursework. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to identify best practices in community college first-year seminars that have been demonstrated to lead to improved outcomes. For the purpose of this study, improved outcomes are defined as the strategies and / or practices that institutions employ in their first-year seminars that directly address the issues of college readiness and President Obama’s 2020 graduation initiative. The author examined the best practices employed by five award-winning recipients of the National Resource Center for First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, using Barefoot & Fidler’s (1996) seven gold standards as the measure by which to gauge best practices. The study identified twelve best practices employed in the first-year seminars at the award-winning institutions investigated in the study: mandatory placement testing, outreach to high-school partners, teaching life skills, early advising, utilization of various methods of assessment, awarding academic credit for the seminars, limiting seminar class size, continual training, and development of seminar staff and faculty, teaching involvement by both faculty and student affairs personnel, compensation for faculty and non-faculty involved in teaching the seminar, the use of upper-level peer mentors, and the inclusion of various seminar types.