Date of Award
4-10-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education (EdD)
Department
Educational Leadership
First Advisor
Suzanne M. Buglione, Ed.D.
Second Advisor
Felice D. Billups, Ed.D.
Third Advisor
Elaine C. Ward, Ed.D.
Abstract
First-year seminar (FYS) courses are designed to assist students through the transition into new academic communities, offering opportunities for students to develop the skills they need to persist through future coursework (Culver & Bowman, 2020). Despite the goal of retaining and empowering students—particularly student populations who have been historically underserved in higher education, such as first-generation, low-income (FGLI) students—observation of the many models of postsecondary FYS has revealed mixed success in terms of student outcomes (Jairam, 2022). It has been suggested in recent literature that metacognition, or “knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomenon” (Flavell, 1979, p. 906), contributes to skill advancement and self-regulation (Callender et al., 2016; Cromley, 2000), making it an ideal theory to apply within the FYS context (Kourtidis, 2019). The purpose of this exploratory descriptive qualitative study (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) was to explore the metacognitive processes of students who are FGLI within a year following completion of an FYS course at a public, baccalaureate-granting institution (N=1) in the Northeastern United States. Through one-on-one, semi-structured interviews, six (N=6) FGLI students were prompted to reflect on their experiences in the FYS classroom, learning strategies employed, their degree of success, and how they internally conceptualized these strategies. Interview data was then triangulated with data from one firstyear seminar director (N=1), two first-year seminar faculty (N=2), and document review. Themes and patterns in this data may be useful to crafting FYS environments where FGLI students of all performance levels can access tools necessary to successfully meet learning goals.
Recommended Citation
Washak, Jessica R., "Supporting Students Where They Are: Exploring First-Generation, Low-Income Students’ Metacognitive Development Post-First Year Seminar" (2024). JWU Dissertations & Theses. 12.
https://scholarsarchive.jwu.edu/jwu_etd/12