Students integrate their learning experiences across contexts through a process of connecting, applying, and synthesizing information, knowledge, and skills.

Students succeed in college by engaging with faculty, peers, and the community. Institutional leaders can utilize organizational learning strategies to learn what works to support civic learning outcomes and student success.

This chapter applies the concept of narrative identity to college student development. The authors describe a narrative interview method that can be used to promote the development of a purposeful life story in the college years.

The dominant paradigm in the literature of college student development reflects a cognitive or psychological bias when considering the effect that college has on students. This chapter offers an alternative perspective by recognizing college as a social process and subsequently examines students' identity formation from a sociological…

This chapter discusses how college students can develop democratic dispositions and a civic identity through learning how to engage in deliberative dialogue on public issues.

This chapter provides guidelines and suggestions for assessing student development using autoethnography, a qualitative research method. Autoethnography guides students in examining the nexus between personal and professional identities, including skills, challenges, values, histories, and hopes for the future.

This chapter presents findings from two recent Pell Institute studies, which explored the characteristics and experiences of low-income, first-generation community college transfer students in Texas and two-year and four-year institutional approaches to facilitating transfer student degree completion. Specifically, the first study asked the…

This chapter provides an analysis of a set of conditions that transfer students will most likely face in their transition to a new institution. The specific focus is on transfer from two-year to four-year institutions. This chapter will identify many of the common challenges transfer students face simply because they are entering a new learning…

This chapter offers a set of recommendations for two-year and four-year institutions related to the evaluation and implementation of transfer policy and practice. These recommendations were drawn from a major study to investigate the perspectives of students, staff, and administrators.

Peer influence in academic settings can have significant positive effects on student learners. Examples of peer support of academic endeavors, most notably tutoring, date back to the colonial period of U.S. higher education and persist today. However, over the years, peer education has evolved from being a marginal endeavor in which academic…

Over the past twenty years, economic conditions, deteriorating public support, governmental and societal demands for accountability, and greater numbers of students from historically underrepresented groups have increased pressures on colleges and universities to provide a meaningful education to students while meeting ever increasing expectations…

Technology has become an integral part of landscape of higher education. Students are coming to college with an arsenal of technological tools at their disposal. These tools are being used for informal, everyday communication as well as for formal learning in the classroom. At the same time, higher education is experiencing an increase in peer…

The research literature in higher education is abundantly clear that each student's engagement and involvement in the college experience make a difference in the kind of education the student receives as well as the outcomes. Peer leadership programs in higher education are growing in popularity because they provide a variety of ways to…

As colleges and universities around the country face extreme financial pressures, they also face mounting public expectations to improve and increase the quality and number of services they provide to their students. Some of these expectations include the presumption that the institutions will offer quality health care, fitness, and wellness…

Disability service (DS) offices today need to be resourceful, creative, and forward-thinking in order to meet the needs of college students with disabilities. A key strategy to meeting these needs is to develop relationships with colleagues across the campus, in both Student and Academic Affairs (Whitt et al. 2008). The Center for Students with…