Faculty Perspectives on First-Year Experiential Education in Large Humanities and Social Sciences Courses: Motivations, Methods, Barriers, and Facilitators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Experiential education (EE) is a pedagogical approach based on the premise that certain knowledge can be acquired more effectively through experience rather than lecture-based classroom content. Despite the well-documented benefits of EE across all levels of higher education, existing literature often focuses on small upper-year postsecondary courses. Purpose To identify and analyze key instructor motivations, methods, barriers, and facilitators for incorporating EE in first-year courses (FYEE). Method We conducted 13 qualitative interviews with instructors who incorporate FYEE in humanities and social sciences courses at a large, Canadian research university. Findings Instructors were motivated to incorporate FYEE to support students’ transition from secondary to postsecondary, introduce students to the discipline, and help students prepare for more extensive EE upper-year opportunities. To do so, instructors tailored FYEE as bite-sized teaching or scaffolded versions of community engagement. Instructors also identified institutional barriers and facilitators to implementing FYEE. Implications This research addresses an empirical gap in EE scholarship and makes recommendations to support FYEE at the administrative and teaching levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".