The Influence of First-Year "Success" Courses on Student Learning and Democratic Outcomes

This study extends the extant research on first-year programs to include a closer examination of their impact on student learning and democratic outcomes. Based on data collected from three courses—a first-year success course with an explicit focus on diversity, an introductory communication course, and an introductory engineering course—we examined student change across three outcomes: multicultural awareness, commitment to social justice, and attributional complexity. Our findings suggest that although students in the different courses showed no pretest differences on the outcome variables, only students in the first-year success course made significant gains on all three outcomes. ANCOVA results also demonstrated significant course effects for the first-year success course after controlling for a number of covariates. The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of using developmental theory to guide first-year programming and implications for practice.