Foundations for Learning

With recent research indicating that most first-year students are more challenged than past generations in making the transition to college, Hazard and Nadeau encourage students to pursue scholarship. From the first chapter, which deals with becoming part of a scholarly community, to the challenging vocabulary used in each chapter, to the theoretical references used to underpin major concepts, Foundations for Learning focuses heavily on academics while also examining emotional and social adjustment issues.

Features include:

• Theoretical Justifications — offered for major topics, providing academic substance for each chapter via a psycho-educational perspective.
• Student Narratives — portray realistic stories of first-year students and their struggles with such issues as student-faculty relations, reading comprehension, and participating in class discussion.
• Make it Personal Questions — aim to get students to apply concepts to their own unique situations.
• Current trends--addressed technology’s impact on the college transition (re: Myspace and Facebook).
• Conversational tone and active style - directed to students without “talking down” to them - offers advice in a straightforward and lucid way.
• New Diversity chapter - delivered through a unique lens (a discourse approach as opposed to a didactic one).

Additional Support — in and out of the classroom…

Visit the Student Success Supersite (www.prenhall.com/success), where students and faculty will find an array of resources. In addition, instructors will be pleased to know that Foundations For Learning offers an Instructor’s Manual and PowerPoint slides.

Start strong. Finish stronger.

www.MyStudentSuccessLab.com

The focus of Foundations for Learning is on academic adjustment for first-year college students with personal development issues seamlessly integrated into the academic emphasis. The theme is claiming an education and taking responsibility for one's own education. What is most unique about this book is that it addresses both the attitudinal variables and personality traits that affect college achievement like locus of control, conceptions of intelligence, and intellectual curiosity in relation to specific study-related behaviors such as text annotation and active listening. Students are pushed to consider how each skill set, perception, and attitude connects with and influences the other.

Laurie L. Hazard has been teaching and designing curricula for First-Year Experience and study skills courses for the last fifteen years. She is the Director of the Academic Center for Excellence and Writing Center at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and the Curriculum Coordinator for their First-Year Experience course. Her area of expertise is the personality traits and attitudes of college students that influence academic achievement and mediate the utilization of newly learned study strategies.

As a New England Peer Tutor Association Board member, she has hosted their Annual Forum at her institution. Laurie regularly presents at national conferences such as the First Year Experience and Students in Transition, the Conference on College Composition, and the College Reading and Learning Association. Laurie has taught courses in college reading and study skills, liberal arts seminars, psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, and social psychology.

Laurie has done extensive work writing about and assessing the effectiveness of learning assistance programs and FYE courses. She has been a Guest Editorial Board member for the Learning Assistance Review. Publications by Laurie and her co-author include: Exploring the Evidence, Volume III: Reporting Outcomes of First-Year Seminars, a monograph published by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition and “What Does It Mean to be ‘College-Ready’?”, an article which appears in Connection: The Journal of the New England Board of Higher Education, at http://www.nebhe.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=71.

Laurie was recently selected by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition as a top ten Outstanding First-Year Student Advocate.

Jean-Paul Nadeau is an instructor at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts.