What is Student Academic Achievement

This chapter explores how combining carefully selected high-impact educational practices in the critical first-year of college can benefit students, particularly traditionally underserved student populations, and promote cultural sensitivity and communication with a wider campus audience than is typically available to the traditional college freshmen. The First Year Experience Study Abroad (FYESA) program combines three high-impact educational experiences; freshman seminar, service-learning, and global learning, in one innovative program targeting freshman students in their second semester. The purpose of the program is to provide students with an extension of the Freshman Seminar through their entire first-year, coupled with strategies for increasing diversity awareness and sensitivity in the classroom and abroad by engaging in experiential learning in the form of service-learning. As part of the program, freshman students will plan a service-learning project in the host country over the spring semester and then deliver the project during the travel abroad portion of the course.