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Exploring Quality Dimensions In First-year Seminars For Student-Athletes
Introduction
Sports are a basic part of American society. Over $100 billion is spent annually on sports ranging from basketball, football to indoor games, and the country’s fourth-highest expense. Sports provide athletes with not only a healthy life but also financial freedom, popularity, and success. It is no surprise that sports abilities and talents are cultivated from a young age with such significance. Students who participate in sports are often recruited from high school to join the athletic teams of institutions they otherwise might not have gotten into. Once they join these institutions, their prowess and success tend to focus mainly on sports and not academics.
The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) is the main body dedicated to college athletes’ lifelong success and well-being. This is due to the obvious gap that exists among college athletes who do not perform well in their academic careers since all their energy and time are dedicated to their sport. If they are not drafted into national leagues after college or end up with a career-ending injury, these athletes end up having wasted their college years with no academic credentials to fall back on. To avoid this, many bodies and organizations have been set up to help student-athletes do better. One of these efforts is the first-year seminars, which aim to acclimate the student with their new university life.
First-Year Seminars
One of the two largely used high impact practices, first-year seminars are used to improve academic performance, retention, and skill attainment in first-year students. The other HIP is known as learning communities, which are known to work hand in hand to improve student outcomes. First-year seminars are simply a range of programs and courses designed to help students in their social and academic development as well as their transition into college (Hunter & Binder 275). The main goal of these seminars is to create a sense of community within the classroom.
There are six types of first-year seminars (Upcraft et al. 16). The first is the extended orientation seminar, whose content generally includes an introduction to campus resources, time management, career plans, and learning strategies. The second is the academic seminar with uniform content, which is often theme oriented. This seminar is commonly part of a general curriculum requirement where specific academic skills are cultivated, such as critical thinking and leadership skills.
Basic study skills seminars are offered to academically underprepared students and focus on basic skills such as reading texts, note-taking, and grammar. Professional or discipline seminars focus on preparing students for the realities and demands of their majors and discipline such as engineering, education, or health sciences. The fifth seminar is the academic seminar with varying content across sections where topics commonly related to the discipline can differ. Finally, the hybrid seminar usually has different aspects from different types of seminars.
When done well, first-year seminars have shown significant positive effects on academic engagement and campus involvement. Roughly 73.5% of higher education institutions offer some form of first-year seminars. The main goals and objectives of these seminars are to help students orient themselves to the campus services and resources, to help students cultivate a connection to the institution, to grow students’ academic, critical thinking, and study skills, to create a uniform first-year experience and improve second-year return rates amongst many more.
HIPs and Student-Athletes
High Impact Practices are important as they help educators gauge whether students are effectively participating in learning. This is especially true among student-athletes who barely have time to engage in meaningful academic activities. High impact practices such as first-year seminars have a better chance of engaging learners over traditional instruction since they create proactive environments for students to engage in (Moore 116). If done well, high impact practices have shown compensatory effects on non-traditional students such as student-athletes.
First-year seminars are diverse in nature, with institutions offering sessions for students with common traits such as academic majors or risk of dropping out. Only 8.4% of institutions actually section off student-athletes for their first-year seminars, while others simply lump them off with other student groupings (Upcraft ET AL. 18). There seems to be little to no information about student-athlete seminars, curriculum, and learning outcomes regardless of the obvious advantages of such programs.
Student-Athlete Characteristics
Student-athletes, unlike their peers, have a different college experience. On top of all the pressures of a regular first-year college student to integrate and perform academically, they are also expected to perform exceptionally in the sport that got them into the school. This, with the knowledge that if they cannot perform in their given sport, they might lose out on their spots in these institutions.
The major time demands associated with these sports can serve as a barrier to participation in high impact practices and other academic programs. Due to their athletic involvement, student-athletes possess unique needs and wants that such programs must consider. In the NCAA, athletes are grouped into different divisions depending on rank and ability. Division 1 student-athletes face the highest demands since their time spent on athletics is significantly higher than that spent on academics.
First-year student-athletes need programs that support learning to adapt to college sports’ higher athletic requirements, more demanding academics, and new social environments. Considering that these athletes, on average, spend 37.3 hours on academics and 35 hours on sports a week, there is barely enough time for them even to cultivate a social life. Without some form of support, student-athletes face burnout, high anxiety, and stress levels, and even depression (Cox et al. 130). The same study expresses that at least 20% of both male and female student-athletes experienced depression within the first 12 months of college, while at least 30% experienced anxiety within that time.
First-year student-athletes need to develop positive self-check and coping skills that help them mitigate these stress factors. Part of first-year seminars for student-athletes should involve teaching resilience and asking for mental health support. Athletes lack both time and motivation to seek mental health support due to stigma compared to non-athletes (Moore 120). Furthermore, they are less likely to take part in campus engagement activities, which would expose them to more social engagements, which isolates them from the rest of the campus population. There is some dissent among researchers regarding whether or not student-athletes are negatively affected by their athletic involvement.
However, the one thing that researchers agree on is that on-campus student engagement is fundamental for first-year athletes to identify with both their roles as athletes and students. This role, also known as athletic identity, plays a role in athletes deciding whether they wanted to explore career options outside of their sport (Moore, 125). The common conclusion is that athletes who get involved in an ideal first-year experience show interest in academic and career topics, showing that athletes intend to pursue careers outside of professional sports regardless of success.
First-year seminars for student-athletes require topics such as identity exploration, career, and major identification, given that their experiences are so different from regular students. These programs must be tuned to the different student populations (Grafnetterova, Hawkinson & Rodriguez 130). Ideally, FYS programs can help cultivate academic growth and development within an otherwise ignored population. Athletic participation does not only breed negative outcomes, though. It fosters community, eases the transition into college, provides opportunities for interaction with various cultures, fosters a sense of belonging and persistence (Grafnetterova, Hawkinson & Rodriguez 130).
Quality Implementation of FYS
The design and curriculum of first-year seminars for student-athletes are of high quality in many schools. Many institutions teach several sections of the same FYS to filter out different populations, ensuring that the different student groups are catered to. Participation in these programs significantly improved persistence into the second year of college and beyond, increased satisfaction and sense of belonging, and increased interpersonal skills. While there remains a small gap in the frequent and constructive feedback category of quality implementation, this could be an aspect that changes between institutions.
Many FYS combine multiple high-impact practices, including service learning, collaborative assignments, projects, and ePortfolios. As student-athletes participate in multiple such activities, their graduation and engagement rate significantly rises. Some schools even connect these FYPs to their compulsory curriculum, which improves their outcomes for student-athletes who often lack time to participate in some seminars.
There is a significant difference between the ways athlete FYS are designed and implemented in different institutions. For many, the number of course outcomes and projections seem overwhelming for both students and instructors. The FYS must continuously balance these learning outcomes, which ideally would be narrowed down to manageable expectations to foster healthy working behaviors (Grafnetterova, Hawkinson & Rodriguez 138).
Many student-athlete FYS are taught by a member of the athletic department, a factor that takes away the authenticity of the program. However, when a full-time faculty member teaches these programs, the student outcomes are much better. Without collaboration between academic and athletic departments, student-athletes suffer. Collaboration within the community is also a major factor in the success of FYS as these community members can contribute as guests and workshop leaders for these seminars.
Conclusion
Based on the studies involved in this literature, student-athlete FYS require a high level of practice dimensions. They need to address real student-athlete needs and employ best practices for this group. Student-athletes face a whole different set of challenges compared to their agemates when it comes to balancing a healthy academic and athletic relationship. The first year is the most important to ensure that students settle into the system with the most positive outcomes.
When done right, first-year seminars have recorded higher retention records into the second year and beyond, improved graduation rates, and an overall improvement in how student-athletes handle the pressure of their roles. FYS should be based on research, intentional, and be based on high impact practices. The design of student-athlete FYS must be intentional in the application of HIP dimensions in order to adequately serve this unique population.
First-year seminars are crucial to the success of student-athletes and students in general. Therefore, curriculum designers’ implementation requires a lot of deliberate actions to ensure that this group of students is not alienated. Furthermore, collaboration within and without the community works to integrate student-athletes more into the real world.
Works Cited
Cox, Charles E., Lindsay Ross-Stewart, and Brad D. Foltz. “Investigating the prevalence and risk factors of depression symptoms among NCAA Division I collegiate athletes.” Journal of Sports Science 5.1 (2017).
Grafnetterova, Nikola, Chelsie L. Hawkinson, and Rachel L. Rodriguez. “Connected at the HIP: Exploring Quality Dimensions in First-Year Seminars for Student-Athletes.” Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics (2020).
Graziano, Janine, and Lauren Chism Schmidt, eds. Building Synergy for High-Impact Educational Initiatives: First-Year Seminars and Learning Communities. Stylus Publishing, LLC, 2016.
Moore, Matt. “Stepping outside of their comfort zone: Perceptions of seeking behavioral health services amongst college athletes.” Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics 2017.Special Issue (2017): 130-144.
Upcraft, M. Lee, John N. Gardner, and Betsy Overman Barefoot. Challenging and supporting the first-year student: A handbook for improving the first year of college. Vol. 254. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005.