Principles for Assessing Student Engagement in the First Year of College.

welcoming new students as they move from high school, work, military service, or a "gap year."Humans have long acknowledged the importance of beginnings and transitions such as the first year of college.In Roman culture, Janus was believed to rule over doors and gates as the god of beginnings, and American folk wisdom acknowledges the importance of "starting right" as the first step in ensuring successful outcomes.Educators have assigned special importance to the first year of college as the foundation for the college experience, an element too important to leave to chance.Over the past two decades, college faculty and staff have developed a host of educational initiatives to undergird this transition period.First-year seminars are one such innovation and, according to a 2001 survey by the Policy Center on the First Year of College, can be found at 94 percent of accredited colleges and universities.Other common components of first-year programs include mandatory academic advising, course placement testing, early warning systems for low academic performance, learning community structures, and special residential programming.Until recently, assessment of first-year activities was often limited to evaluating their impact on first-to-second-year persistence in college.Over the past five years, assessment of first-year students and structures has developed rapidly, spurred by the accountability agenda of The Pew Charitable Trusts.New tools and techniques have been developed so that two-year and four-year institutions can assess what students do during the first year of college and how they change as a result of participating in educational activities.These new tools join the handful of existing survey instruments that were specially designed to assess student experiences in their first college year (see Exhibit 1).A plethora of research on what matters in the first year and an array of new outcome assessment tools have made possible the development of comprehensive assessment