THE INFLUENCE OF PEER EDUCATORS IN A FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR ON FRESHMAN PREPARATION FOR COLLEGIATE CHALLENGES: A QUALITATIVE INVESTIGATION OF OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

Abstract

Most high school students have not spent deliberate time preparing for their transition to college. Knowing this, institutions have developed a first-year seminar geared toward transitional issues inherent to a specific institution. While the research on these programs illustrates their utility, there appears to be an opportunity to further their success by incorporating peers as educators in the classroom. Bandura (1986) saw the potential of observational learning through peer modeling, though few researchers have studied first-year seminars from this theoretical perspective. Through a postpositivistic philosophical paradigm, this exploratory qualitative study utilized a phenomenological design to investigate two research questions: what are the academic and social challenges freshmen face in the transition to a small, private, highly selective, STEM-focused institution and how does the presence of sophomore peer educators in a first-year seminar influence freshman preparation for those fall quarter challenges. A total of 41 freshmen participated in the study. Data were collected through student journals and focus group interviews. The results of this study confirm that the transition to this specific type of institution is just as complex as the transition to other types of institutions, with students reporting similar academic and social challenges as found in the literature. However, their emphasis was on the core (i.e., academic) rather than the periphery (i.e., social) of the collegiate experience. The application of modeling, however, was not strong enough to determine whether observational learning influenced these transitional challenges.