Joe Cuseo

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus at Marymount California University, United States

Certainly, beginning college and beginning a career are events taking place at very different points in time and represent quite different life transitions. However, the process of exploring career options and developing career-entry skills should begin in the first year of college. Early career planning gives beginning college students a practical...

Cooperative Learning Seven Central Features Cooperative learning (CL) is a form collaborative learning that includes a set of structured procedures intentionally designed to convert group work into teamwork. In short, CL involves the use of small, intentionally selected groups of students who work interdependently on a well-defined learning task,...

After the first year of college, are there other important and identifiable stages or transitions in the college experience? Could the undergraduate experience be conceptualized in terms of four successive stages (first year, sophomore, junior, and senior experiences), each with its own set of stage-specific tasks and adjustments? May such stages s...

The objective of this manuscript is twofold: (a) critically review research on how students’ decision-making process with respect to selecting college majors and careers relates to their persistence in college, and (b) tease-out practical implications of this research for improving the academic advisement, long-range planning, and retention of firs...

Synthesizes research pointing to the urgent need for American colleges and universities to increase retention and completion rates, and suggests strategies that have the potential to close gaps in the overall quality of undergraduate education, particularly for students from underserved populations.

This manuscript supplies a detailed set of student-centered, culturally inclusive teaching strategies for motivating and engaging students with the subject matter. The instructional strategies identified in this document elevate the academic achievement all students but have particularly positive impact on closing the equity gap, giving disadvantag...

The liberal arts represent the core of your college experience; they provide foundational, ver-satile skills that spell success in all college majors, careers, and life roles. In this chapter, you will gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the liberal arts and acquire strategies for making the most of general education. You will learn abo...

This short manuscript outlines the advantages associated with the university college organizational structure, sources of resistance to its implementation, and resources designed to promote its successful implementation.

Strategies for promoting collaboration between Academic and Student Affairs have focused heavily on promoting organizational or structural changes. Collaboration may also be promoted through processes that promote positive interpersonal interactions and harmonious working relationships between faculty and student development professionals. The stra...

There are five currently compelling reasons why academic and student affairs’ professionals need to join forces: 1. To enhance student retention (persistence to graduation) 2. To maximize student learning 3. To advance institutional assessment, accountability, and quality 4. To fulfill the overarching collegiate goals of general (liberal) educatio...

This manuscript makes a case for careful attention to the transfer transition—particularly the transition from 2-year to 4-year institutions, and synthesizes research on the common characteristics and experiences of transfer students. Based on this synthesis, specific strategies are offered for advisors and advising administrators at 2-year and 4-y...

The tide of transfer-eligible community college students is rising. Four-year campuses need to ready themselves for this rising tide; in many instances, this will require more attention and support for transfer students than they have historically provided. This manuscript offers specific recommendations for increasing the scope and impact of 4-yea...

Almost one-half of all people in this country with a bachelor’s degree started their college education at a two-year college before transferring to and graduating from a four-year college or university (National Student Clearing House Research Center, 2015). Listed below are strategies that prospective students can use to prepare for successful tra...

This manuscript makes the case and offers strategies for a first-year experience course (aka first-year seminar) designed to facilitate the initial transition and subsequent success of transfer students.

Rather than assuming that transfer students have already made a successful transition to higher education and do not need help doing it again, or that new transfer students have the same needs as new students transitioning to higher education from high school, this manuscript makes the case and offers strategies for customizing orientation to meet...

This manuscript offers an extensive array of effective instructional practices for teaching the first-year experience course and first-year courses in general, including syllabus construction, classroom pedagogy, out-of-class assignments, testing and grading.

This manuscript proposes a taxonomy for classifying first-year seminars that builds on, and extends the basic types (prototypes) of seminars included in the typology being developed at the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience & Students in Transition (South Carolina). The multiple options identified should increase the likelihood...

In the early 1990s, The National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition sponsored four national conferences that have been devoted exclusively to the "Senior Year Experience" (SYE), plus several national conferences on "Students in Transition" which included the SYE as one of its three major strands. In this docume...

Five key features tend to characterize effective student-success systems and educational reform efforts in higher education: 1. Holistic: They engage the whole student and the whole campus. 2. Systemic: They create a comprehensive, cross-divisional infrastructure that has the potential to generate synergistic (multiplicative) effects on student su...

This document first provides a review of the research literature is provided on the relationship between student-faculty contact outside the classroom and various educational outcomes. The document concludes with a series of two-dozen practices that serve to promote meaningful faculty-student contact outside the classroom.

This manuscript makes the case that staff working in higher education can play significant educational roles that go above and beyond "customer service." They can contribute not only to student retention, but also to student learning and personal development.

After the first year of college, are there other important and identifiable stages or transitions in the college experience? Could the undergraduate experience be conceptualized in terms of four successive stages (first year, sophomore, junior, and senior experiences), each with its own set of stage-specific tasks and adjustments? May such stages s...

This manuscript makes the case that a "rigorous" learning experience depends as much, or more, on the nature of the mental actions that the learner performs during the experience than on the particular content or subject matter on which those actions are performed.

New students encounter different adjustments at different times during their first term in college and are more likely to be receptive to information and advice that is delivered at times when they need it. Simply stated, students are more willing and “ready” to acquired knowledge that’s timely and immediately applicable to their current challenges...

This short manuscript discusses attrition associated with student transfer to other campuses perceived as being more prestigious ("trading up") and strategies for stemming it.

This manuscript conceptualizes enrollment management as a continuum ranging from initial recruitment of prospective students through re-recruitment of departing students. A template for exit interviews with departing students that includes a re-recruitment component is provided.

This document contains an inventory designed to raise campus awareness of key policies, procedures and practices that may be used to improve student retention and completion rates. The items comprising this survey do not represent a prescriptive or exhaustive list of retention “best practices”; instead, they are offered as a set of high-priority st...

This document contains an inventory designed to raise campus awareness of key policies, procedures and practices that may be used to improve student retention and completion rates. The items comprising this survey do not represent a prescriptive or exhaustive list of retention “best practices”; instead, they are offered as a set of high-priority st...

This manuscript identifies and debunks the following six myths about student retention: 1) Attrition is a “student problem,” not a campus or institutional problem. 2) Retention would not be a problem if we just admitted “better students.” 3) Students drop out because they “can’t cut it” academically, i.e., they “flunk out.” 4) The faculty’s job is...

This document makes the case that student selectivity is a specious measure of college quality and has an adverse effect on the recruitment and retention of underrepresented student populations (e.g., low-income, first-generation students).

This manuscript makes a conceptual and empirical case that faculty research productivity should not be viewed as an indicator of university quality and/or instructional effectiveness.

This article critically examines four popular criteria used to determine university quality: (1) institutional reputation (prestige), (2) student selectivity (exclusivity), (3) faculty research productivity, and (4) institutional wealth (fiscal resources). It will be demonstrated that these traditional indices of university excellence are largely i...

While higher education continues to search for a better way to measure and promote college quality, comparative assessment of American colleges and universities is being conducted and reported to the public regularly in the form of college rankings in mass-media publications. These rankings are growing in circulation and seem to be exerting increas...

This manuscript identifies and refutes the major criteria used for ranking college quality used by popular college-ranking magazines. Some of the ranking criteria discussed have been continually used repeatedly since mass-media rankings began; others may have been used at one time but not currently. Criteria no longer in use are still identified an...

This manuscript makes the case that other criteria and methodologies are needed to assess college quality than those used in mass-media rankings and offers an alternative approach .

This single-page document identifies and defines 12 distinctive characteristics of effective student students support programs and student success initiatives.

This document consists of a detailed pre/post instruments designed to assess attitudinal and behavioral outcomes associated of a first-year experience course.

This manuscript makes an empirical and conceptual case for the value of peer leadership and the benefits of peer leadership development programs for promoting student retention and success.

Effective leaders engage in an ongoing process of assessing how they’re doing and what they need to do better. This self-assessment instrument is designed to support peer leaders in this process of continuous leadership improvement. This isn’t a test of leadership competence or potential; it’s an opportunity for peer leaders to recognize their stre...

Research and scholarship in higher education suggest that there are recurrent features that characterize effective delivery of student-support programs; the objective of this article is to abstract and highlight these critical features so they may be used as guidelines for successful delivery of new-student orientation programs. Seven properties of...

This document contains a short, institutional self-assessment instrument designed to evaluate the quality and comprehensiveness of a new-student orientation program.

This manuscript supplies conceptual and empirical arguments supporting the value of new-student orientation programs.

This manuscripts supplies a typology questions that may be used as prompts for one-minute papers and identifies multiple benefits associated with this instructional strategy.

This manuscript identifies objectives, content, and delivery strategies for new-faculty orientation programs.

The importance of remembering a person’s name is poignantly articulated by Dale Carnegie in his classic book, How to Win Friends and Influence People: “We should be aware of the magic contained in a name and realize that this single item is wholly and completely owned by the person with whom we are dealing and nobody else. Remember that a person’s...

Two primary routes through which instructors can stimulate student interest and motivation for learning course content are: (a) how the content is packaged and “sold”—e.g., how its titled, described, organized and sequenced; and (b) the process through which content is delivered—e.g., how it’s taught, or the instructional methods used to facilita...

This short manuscript makes a succinct empirical and conceptual case supporting the value of mentoring for college students in general and first-generation students in particular.

Whenever possible, course content should be taught primarily via student-centered instructional methods; however, there may be times when instructors will need to make class presentations or deliver short “lectures.” The following guidelines are recommended for determining when, why, and how to deliver lectures.

In the mid-1990s, clarion calls were sounded for improving the quality of undergraduate education that solicited a paradigm shift—away from the traditional focus on the teacher and the teaching process—to a “new learning paradigm” that focuses on the learner and the learning process (American College Personnel Association, 1994; Angelo, 1997; Barr...

In this document, intended outcomes of instructor training for the first-year experience course (aka, first-year seminar) are identified, along with potential measures of these outcomes. This general discussion of program outcomes and related outcome measures is followed by a more detailed examination of quantitative and qualitative program-evaluat...

As important as the content of an instructor development program (the "what" of it) is its process of delivery (the "how" of it). This manuscript recommends specific practices for delivering an effective instructional development program for instructors teaching a first-year experience course.

This manuscript identifies four core topics as jey components of a comprehensive instructor-training program that would make the experience relevant for new-student seminar instructors in particular, and for college faculty in general: (1) understanding first-year students (2) understanding the institution, (3) implementing engaging teaching-learn...

Promoting student success (e.g., persistence to graduation and academic achievement) requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond strictly the academic or intellectual dimension of student development to address the student in a holistic (whole-person) fashion. This manuscript marshal evidence supporting the value of taking a holistic approac...

What if we could create a typology/taxonomy of higher-level thinking that captures universal themes of deep thinking that we can use across the curriculum and across different academic divisions, while at the same time, acknowledging that there are variations among different fields of study in the way these themes are adapted and applied to the spe...

At first glance, the first-year seminar (FYS) may appear to be nothing more than a single, circumscribed course taken by first-year students during their first term on campus. However, the seminar has the capacity to do much more than serve as a “band aid;” it can take on the broader properties of an educational program with the potential to exert...

By definition, a “seminar” is a teaching-learning experience that takes place in an intimate group setting and is characterized by an active exchange of ideas among its participants. To be true to its name, class size for the first-year seminar should be kept as small as possible. This manuscript offers conceptual and empirical arguments for class...

Stimulating student interest and motivation is an essential element of effective college teaching. This manuscript offers instructional strategies for generating student interest in the first-year experience course.

Because of the seminar’s non-traditional course content and holistic, student-centered focus, not all faculty are equally desirable candidates for handling the instructional challenges of the first-year seminar (aka, first-year experience course). This manuscript offers recommendations and strategies for recruiting instructors whose qualities and i...

The following practices are offered as strategies for improving the reliability, validity, and equity of student-evaluation and grading practices in the first-year seminar (aka, first-year experience course).

This article makes the case that the first-year seminar (aka, first-year experience course) has intended learning outcomes that are congruent with those of a liberal education.The course's holistic, learner-centered, and skill-oriented focus fill a void in an otherwise content-driven general education curriculum.

This short manuscript articulates the advantages of offering a first-year experience course that runs the entire first term, rather than half the semester.

This manuscripts synthesizes research supporting the positive impact of the first-year experience course on student retention, persistence to graduation, and academic performance.

This manuscripts makes a conceptual and empirical case for offering the first-year experience course (aka, first-year seminar) for academic credit and a letter grade.

There is considerable variability in the content of first-year seminars. Some “academic” seminars focus exclusively on a common academic theme that unites the content of all course sections (e.g., global awareness), or focus on specialized topics that vary from section to section depending on the specialized scholarly interest of the course instruc...

Proponents of first-year seminars should expect to encounter institutional resistance because its content is unorthodox, unfamiliar, and does not fitting neatly into traditional conceptions or perceptions what an academic course should “look like.” Consequently, attempts to introduce this “foreign body” into the traditional curriculum are likely to...

The first-year experience course at community colleges not only has the potential to facilitate the student transition to college; it can also promote student transition from 2-year to 4-year institutions and achievement of a baccalaureate degree—particularly if the course involves academic advising and educational planning as a core component. Thi...

An old rule of thumb for college students is that they should spend 2-3 hours working on the course outside of class for every one hour they spend in class. If this rule is followed in the fist-year seminar (aka, first-year experience course), it means instructors actually have at least twice as much time to promote student learning outside of clas...

The impact of the first-year seminar depends not only on its content, but also its design and delivery—both pedagogical and administrative. Given the non-traditional nature of the seminar and the intense political resistance that typically accompanies its introduction into the college curriculum, administration of this course requires a much more i...

This manuscript makes an empirical case for use of active learning strategies in the first-year seminar (aka, first-year experience course) and offers specific strategies for doing so.

This short manuscript makes a conceptual and empirical case for offering the first-year experience course (aka, first -year seminar) for the maximum number of units possible.

If campuses aspire to deliver a comprehensive first-year experience (FYE) , they should not only “front load” the FYE but also “back load” the first year with retention-promoting programming at the end of the first year that effectively bridges the first and second year of college—before first-year students depart for the summer. Such timely interv...

Ten target areas or focus points for institutional development and assessment of a comprehensive first-year experience program are cited in this manuscript. These target areas derive from empirical research and scholarly reports published in the higher education literature which identify college practices that are positively associated with the fol...

Why has the First-Year Experience (FYE) and Students in Transition (SIT) movement attracted the interest of so many educators around the globe and sustained that interest for more than a quarter of a century. This article identifies five distinctive and influential features this long-standing national and international movement.

The purpose of this manuscript is to equip instructors with skills for improving the quality, validity, and equity of assessing student learning. The principles and strategies cited should also improve the quality of teaching and promote the academic achievement of students from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The effectiveness of diversity education depends not only on the content of the curriculum, but also on the instructional methods used to deliver the content. As much thought should be given to what teaching strategies will be employed as to what material will be covered; in other words, process is as important as content. This manuscript explores...

When diversity is infused into your college education, its benefits are deepened and multiplied. This manuscript describes the ways in which diversity enriches and extends the benefits of a college education.

This manuscript summarizes seven key strategies for accelerating student completion of developmental education.

This manuscript offers 10 instructional strategies for promoting students' higher-level (higher-order) thinking skills.

This document provides a sample of exemplary or innovative convocation practices employed at postsecondary institutions, preceded by information on (a) the meaning and purposes of convocation and (b) the case for convocation, i.e., its value and

This document identifies one-dozen strategies for increasing promoting commuter students' campus involvement and social integration.

This article summarizes 21 top strategies for improving student-success rates at community colleges.

The optimal curricular venue through which to deliver the course-integrated educational/vocational support new community college students need to discover themselves and their educational/career path is the first-year experience (FYE) course. This article argues that the FYE course should be considered be one of the set of courses that comprise the...

This manuscript focuses on the distinctive challenges faced by community college practitioners and student-success advocates. These challenges are offered with the understanding that they are likely to vary in severity from campus to campus, depending on its location (urban, suburban, rural) and campus-specific policies or procedures. Some of these...

This paper addresses the following four questions: (1) What is the definition of co-curriculum and curriculum? Where do these terms come from? (2) What research exists about why [the co-curriculum] is important for student success, with attention to how it helps non-traditional students and students with diverse backgrounds? (3) The popular book, A...

This manuscript contains: (a) a definition/description of a co-curricular transcript, (b) a short review of some literature that makes a case for its value, and (c) sample materials used for administration of the transcript at one college. The opening material may be used to garner initial support for development of a co-curricular transcript—...

This article contains 21questions that may be used to assess the breadth and quality of co-curricular programming.

A “one-minute paper” which may be defined as a short (one minute or less) writing activity engaged in after completion of a learning experience—in response to a question posed at the end of a learning experience (e.g., “What was the most memorable or useful thing you learned today?”). The nature of the question can vary, depending on the nature and...

National research reveals that student evaluations are the most widely used source of information for assessing college course and instructor effectiveness (Seldin, 1993). If student development programs are to be truly perceived, not as “extracurricular” activities, but as co-curricular experiences that are equally important for promoting student...

This article represents the second part of a two-part series. Part I focused on research-based strategies for improving the quality of a student evaluation instrument’s content and form. This part focuses on the process in which the evaluation instrument is administered or delivered, and how data generated by the instrument may be most effectively...

Classification of a variety of cooperative learning formats into a meaningful taxonomy. The taxonomy can serve as a stand-alone “procedural index file” of team-learning strategies, each of which is comprised of step-by-step practices.

Procedural recommendations for maximizing the positive impact of group work are offered in the form of guiding questions rather than rigid rules or formulaic prescriptions.

Delineation of postsecondary practices subsumed or assumed to be embraced by the umbrella terms, collaborative learning, cooperative learning, and learning community, and organization of these practices into a coherent classification system or taxonomy.

Discussion of bottom-up, top-down, and side-in (across-the-middle) strategies for promoting student-centered change in higher education.

Strategies for designing, administering, and analyzing the results of assessment surveys

Key questions and target areas for first-year experience program assessment