Connecting the Dots: Helping First-Year Students Bridge the Gap Between High School and College

Introduction

As an educator and continuous learner, the author often ways to improve the overall collegiate experience for students. These thoughts led the author to participate in the Freshmen Centric Couse Initiative offered through Florida A&M University 2021 faculty training series. With the constant change in education pedagogy, the author is continuously looking to improve and enhance teaching skills. This particular faculty development course focused on first-year students and how to reimagine teaching techniques for said students. The course changed the author's mindset about first-year students. It made the author realize that succeeding was not just the responsibility of the student, but also the institution's responsibility to ensure students received what they needed in terms of content-related sustained learning outcomes. As a faculty member who is a part of the institution, that responsibility also falls to this author.

As a faculty member who teaches first-year students, the author had the task of reimaging the first-year student and reconsider how first-year students engage with college socially and academically. Participating in the Freshmen Centric faculty development made the author realize it was time to look beyond the traditional methods of instruction and focus on ideas that would set students up to succeed within and external of course. The course offered an overview of techniques such as Bloom's Taxonomy, which allowed training participants and the author explore the effectiveness of the existing learning objectives within their courses. Bloom’s Taxonomy “classified forms and levels of learning based on cognitive processes that learners involved in when they learn” (Darwazeh & Branch, 2015). The faculty training participants examined and modified objectives to create specific and clear learning objectives that would help students understand what they would learn and what they should be able to do at the end of a lesson, module, test, or semester.

Another teaching strategy taught was cognitive wrappers. Bowen & Watson, (2017) define cognitive wrappers as “very short survey (online or a single sheet of paper) given to students with assignment or exam feedback; which should be brief, easy, flexible and specific to both the discipline and the specific task at hand are a reflective short survey that is given to students.” Cognitive wrappers consist of four parts which include, rationale: explains to the student the purpose of the wrapper, reflection: ask the student to think about how they prepared, comparison: has the student analyze mistakes made, adjustment: requires the student to think through how they will prepare for the assignment in the future. (Bowen & Watson, 2017).

What this author found most interesting about cognitive wrappers is their development for the student. If implemented correctly and consistently throughout a student's first year, this technique has the ability to improve a student’s critical reflection skills, carrying them throughout their collegiate careers. Cognitive wrappers ask students to reflect on an assignment after receiving their grades. Students are asked questions such as how much time did you spend preparing for this assignment, what would you do differently in preparing for this assignment, who did you reach out to for assistance on this assignment, and other similar questions.

A technique such as cognitive wrappers requires students to look beyond the surface of “what went wrong” or “what went right” and reflect on the techniques, time, and effort they put into their assignment, which created the grade they received. The cognitive wrapper allows a reflection that one would not receive just from staring at a number on a page. The technique helps students create beginner conversation points which they can utilize when they visit their professor during office hours and want to receive feedback about their grade and find out what to do to improve their overall course performance.