II. Construct an Inquiry-based Freshman Year The first year of a university experience needs to provide new stimulation for intellectual growth and a firm grounding in inquiry-based learning and communication of information and ideas. The freshman year is crucially important. It marks a transition in the lives of young people both socially and academically. Many of them will spend a long period away from home for the first time and be required to make new friends and organize their lives without the close attention of families. Those who continue to live at home will have different schedules, different expectations, and different relationships. Freshmen who come directly from high school leave a structured academic program for an environment in which they bear far more personal responsibility for the nature of their learning. The freshman year needs to perform two vital functions: it must be the bridge between high school and home on the one side and the more open and more independent world of the research university on the other, and it must excite the student by the wealth, diversity, scale, and scope of what lies ahead. If it does not perform both those functions successfully, the entire university experience is at risk. Ironically, the first years of university studies, in many ways the most formative of all years, are usually the least satisfactory in terms of concept, curriculum, and pedagogy. Many universities find, to their great distress, that too many students spend time in the first year in remediation programs. Introductory courses often repeat subject matter that freshmen have studied for years rather than introducing new subjects that broaden their horizons and give them a sense of the adventure of learning. Too often the freshman curriculum is a bore and freshman instruction inadequate. Senior professors, when they teach undergraduates, tend to teach majors in advanced courses, although these students are usually the best equipped of all students for learning on their own in the subject of their chosen major. As a result, freshmen--the students who need the very best teaching--may actually receive the worst, and more of them fall away by the end of the freshman year than at any other time. The first-year experience at most research universities was in the past governed by the perceived need to give every student a common base of knowledge. The "general education" requirements are now near extinction at many research universities; what has survived is often more influenced by internal university politics than educational philosophies. The freshman experience needs to be an intellectually integrated one, so that the student will not learn to think of the academic program as a set of disparate and unconnected requirements. Every institution needs to rethink both what every future citizen, regardless of specialty or interests, needs to know in order to receive a degree and at what point that knowledge is best aquired. Radical change is thus essential to make the freshman year successful, a period of perhaps the fastest growth a student experiences during the college years. Seminar Learning The freshman year should be reconfigured for maximum benefit, and the sophomore year should evolve as a result of those changes. The focal point of the first year should be a small seminar taught by experienced faculty. The seminar should deal with topics that will stimulate and open intellectual horizons and allow opportunities for learning by inquiry in a collaborative environment. Working in small groups will give students not only direct intellectual contact with faculty and with one another but also give those new to their situations opportunities to find friends and to learn how to be students. Most of all, it should enable a professor to imbue new students with a sense of the excitement of discovery and the opportunities for intellectual growth inherent in the university experience. Block Scheduling A supportive atmosphere for adjustment to university life can be created by block scheduling cohorts of freshmen into two or three courses during their first semester or year. Groups can also be joined according to mutual curricular interests in living-learning centers or interest-focused residences. Remediation Before Admission The current national attention being given to the idea of fixed graduation standards for public schools recognizes the deficiencies that too many students now bring to college. Entering students should be required to have satisfactory mathematics and oral and written language skills before taking any credit courses. Remediation should not be a function of a research university; for a research university to devote a large portion of its faculty time and its facilities to prepare students for university study represents a dissipation of increasingly scarce resources. Students should acquire the skills they need before entering credit-bearing courses. Intensive summer programs in mathematics and English may in many circumstances provide the necessary skills; students with serious deficits should attend other kinds of institutions prepared to handle their educational needs before enrolling in research universities. International students who need greater experience in spoken or written English should take intensive courses in English as a Second Language, in summers or first semesters, before entering the normal curriculum. Recommendations: A student embarking upon a degree program at a research university should be adequately prepared to meet the intellectual challenges of that program; if remediation is necessary, it should be completed before entering the program. All first-year students should have a freshman seminar, limited in size, taught by experienced faculty, and requiring extensive writing, as a normal part of their experience. Every freshman experience needs to include opportunities for learning through collaborative efforts, such as joint projects and mutual critiques of oral and written work. The freshman program should be carefully constructed as an integrated, interdisciplinary, inquiry-based experience by designs such as: A. Combining a group of students with a combination of faculty and graduate assistants for a semester or a year of study of a single complicated subject or problem. B. Block scheduling students into two or three first-semester courses and integrating those courses so that the professors plan together and offer assignments together. C. If possible, integrating those courses with the freshman seminar, so that there is a wholeness as well as a freshness to the first year. D. Taking advantage of time freed by advanced placement to explore areas not studied in high school in order to encourage students to range as freely as possible before selecting a major.

SIGNS OF CHANGE University Case Study LEAP University University of Utah Entering freshmen at the University of Utah enroll in a year-long seminar led by one instructor and in quarterly Liberal Education Accelerated Program (LEAP) courses linked to the themes of the seminars. Some of these courses meet graduation requirements and some meet core or distribution requirements. LEAP students also enroll in a first-quarter study and computer skills course. Current and past LEAP students are members of the LEAP club, which provides organized social and academic activities such as study groups and guest speakers. SIGNS OF CHANGE University Case Study Sophomore Dialogues and Seminars University Stanford University At Stanford University, sophomores who choose to enroll in a Sophomore College program are housed together in student residences and enroll in small-group classes of approximately 10, led by one professor and two upper-class students. Participants earn 1 or 2 academic credits; examples of topics include "Constitutionalism," "Comparative American Urban Cultures," and "The Process of Discovery in Psychology." Workshops in use of university libraries, research opportunities, and academic decision-making are held.