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