This article describes and illustrates a physics course for first-year college students whose only knowledge of physics is that they do not like the subject. The physics content is driven entirely by what appears in the daily newspapers and generally covers most physics topics in a semester. This course was structured as a learning community that…

As a "wicked problem," climate change requires interdisciplinary understanding and collaboration in order to prepare future leaders to develop solutions. To this end, as an ecologist and an anthropologist at a mid-sized university in the southeastern U.S., we designed a pair of interdisciplinary, research-intensive courses for first-year…

Students in The Honors College at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh are required to take a team-taught first-year seminar in their first semester. The seminar is theme-based and taught by two professors from two different disciplines. The theme of the seminar is food, one teacher is a professor of geography and the other a professor of…

This article describes the design and initial implementation of a multidisciplinary, integrative learning course on the art and science of virtual worlds. The course combines complementary disciplines -- Computing, Physics, and Narrative Art -- in a single general education course for first-year students. The course attempts to incorporate…

The first year university experience is inherently linked to student retention and success. First year students are often unprepared for the academic requirements of university, which can result in stress, poor student outcomes and low student retention rates. Although there is considerable literature on the challenges students face when…

This article describes a year-long doctoral course on ethnographic case study research in which a communities of practice approach helped non-traditional students manage the challenging identity negotiations of entering a new academic field. Co-taught by faculty in two disciplines--Rhetoric and Composition and Teaching, Learning, and Culture--the…

An integrative introduction to the sciences and an introduction to scientific writing can provide a strong foundation for broadly trained STEM majors to explore the interconnectedness of STEM disciplines and prepare them for scientific research. These goals have been accomplished through a sequence of two first-year courses, STEM 101: Integrative…

Students who engage in undergraduate research experiences acquire many benefits, including an understanding of how scientific knowledge is constructed, recognition that knowledge can be complex and uncertain, and the habit of viewing knowledge critically. This paper describes a first-year two-course sequence that provides multidisciplinary…

Transitioning to university can be a daunting endeavour, with student success dependent on a myriad of effects (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). Understanding how to navigate university systems, who to meet, how to get help, how to study, and what goals to set can be hard to grasp (Valle et al., 2003). We provide an overview of the new…

In order to improve problem-solving dispositions, a section of an inquiry-based math sequence for first-year business students was linked with a section of our general education English sequence. We describe how the linked classes worked and compare some preliminary results from linked and unlinked sections of the math sequence.

In this paper, we provide an in-depth view of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant (UTA) program at Virginia Commonwealth University as a potential model for other large research universities who might wish to implement similar learner-centered initiatives in their first-year experience courses. Unlike graduate teaching assistants, whose primary…

This study investigates problem-solving difficulties of novices in a classroom setting, using a German instructional tool, the Fischertechnik kit of approximately 400 parts. In order to analyse the students' thinking processes as they solved the problems, verbal protocol analysis (VPA) was used to record the students'' thinking processes and…

Small German programs need to reach out to first-year students in order to expand the pool of potential majors and minors and to increase program visibility on campus. This article demonstrates how an interdisciplinary Seminar for Freshmen on Vienna and Berlin can be used to introduce students to the study of the German-speaking world by comparing…

Three faculty members from three different professional disciplines outline strategies to engage first-year students in a team-taught, multidisciplinary first-year experience course. The theme of the discussed section is titled food for thought...and action. Assignments are grounded in theories of cooperative and experiential learning. Tentative…

The author reports on various aspects of teaching economics in an interdisciplinary, team-taught course, including reflections on a unique experiment in teaching economics to nonmajors. By the incorporation of selected topics of gender economics into the interdisciplinary course about the changing economic statuses of women throughout history, the…