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This article recommends developing assignments for first-year legal writing courses through collaborations with legal services organizations. The article stems from and describes such ongoing projects at Seattle University School of Law, where several hundred first-year law students have worked on such projects so far. We have partnered with lawyers at organizations like the National Employment Law Project, the ACLU of Washington, and Northwest Justice Project to come up with live issues that they would like to have researched, and they received the best student work product from each class. The partner organizations have used the students' work in several ways, including bringing successful impact litigation, preparing amicus briefs, and lobbying for legislative changes. These projects have increased our students' understanding of the importance of legal research and writing, have motivated our students to improve their work product, and have helped the students gain a different perspective than they often see within the first-year curriculum. The article contextualizes these projects within the traditional legal writing curriculum and the Carnegie Report's recommendations that law schools join lawyering professionalism and legal analysis from the beginning of law school. The article also draws on research into student engagement, including the Law School Survey of Student Engagement. The article discusses the literature regarding somewhat similar collaboration between legal writing and clinical faculty within the law school; these projects are complementary, but they have fewer timing challenges, are less resource-intensive for the law school, and they provide an opportunity to connect the law school with lawyers from community partner organizations. Finally, the article offers some concrete practical solutions to potential challenges in implementing these projects, including making sure that core legal writing objectives are met through the projects and how to teach the projects effectively to first-year ...

The present paper reviews empirical literature on stress and social support relative to first-year post-secondary students, published between 1996 and 2020. Empirical studies included in the literature search focused on stress, coping, and social support specifically among first-year undergraduate students while studying in countries adopting North American higher education models comparable to the United States and Canada. This review examines contextual and psychological antecedents and correlates of stress, as well as associated demographic and achievement variables. Furthermore, this review extends to studies on social support categorized by source (peers, family, faculty, institution, and multiple sources of support). A synthesis and critique of the literature explores the themes in the empirical research presented, as well as considerations for future research.

There are probably two general stages in the field experience in this setting in which the student shows the most genuine desire to learn. The first period is at the beginning of the placement when he is receptive and eager, even though suffering anxiety about beginning. The second period comes when he recognizes his own developing skill and begins to use it. In between there is a long period when the supervisor needs to sustain the student through disappointment, error, and regression. In some situations, the student's desire to retreat may be so strong as to cause the supervisor much concern about whether he will be able to progress further. At these points the supervisor should be especially careful about evaluating the student's ultimate capacity to move ahead. In the field work training of students in this setting, these stages of development are discernible. This does not mean that the development of all the students is uniform, or that they all arrive at the same stage at the same time. One student may spend half of his placement period in the first two stages; another may progress with seemingly little difficulty to the last stage but show little change within it. Nor has it been found that one stage of development is mastered before the student moves into the next; the development of two stages in a student can occur almost simultaneously. Individual differences inevitably come into play, and the stages of learning, as described in this paper, have meaning only when applied to the individual student and his particular learning experience.

First year students arrive at Barnard generally very comfortable in front of a computer, able to use the web to satisfy their interest in popular culture, the arts or politics, and skilled at using websites like Facebook and YouTube to find information about people, movies or music. However, we in the library soon discover that many are at sea in dealing with scholarly information. In particular, they are often unclear as to how to distinguish between articles and books that are scholarly and those that may be well-written and seem authoritative, but are not scholarly. In addition, they have many questions about what constitutes plagiarism; they know that they must not do it, but they are often unclear as to exactly what it is. These, then, are some of the information literacy issues we are trying to deal with in our teaching of first year students at Barnard Library.