Page 19 - International Journal of Process Educaiton (Special Issue)

Foundations of Learning Course (1992)
A Foundations of Learning course teaches first-year students how to learn and become self-growers,
instilling in them the characteristics of a collegiate learner who will succeed in any undergraduate
program.
The Curriculum
The novel idea of teaching students how to learn as
they enter college arose from the many workshops and
discussions that took place during the first annual Problem
Solving Across the Curriculum Conference (Kramer
& Beery, 1990). With the help of more than 20 faculty
members, 21 different learning activities were created
and then carefully assembled into Learning Through
Problem Solving (Apple, Beyerlein & Schlesinger,
1992), a curriculum for incoming first-year students. This
curriculum was designed to help students improve their
capacity for learning, problem solving, writing (journals
and reports), giving presentations, computing, and
analyzing (graphs and data). The purpose and features
of this course were offered in A Foundations Course
for College Freshmen (Baehr & Apple, 1994) and the
first published implementation of this ideal course was
Foundations of Learning (pre-market edition), (Pacific
Crest, 1995). Based on feedback and assessments gathered
during the 1995/1996 academic year, Pacific Crest
announced publication of the first edition of Foundations
of Learning in 1996 (Krumsieg & Baehr). This refined
resource provided activities and methodologies to help
faculty facilitate students in improving their ability to
learn, read, write, work in teams, process information,
communicate, assess, manage, and make the transition to
college. The learning activities in Foundations of Learning for the contents of this curriculum and course.
were also designed to help students develop transferable
International Journal of Process Education (February 2016, Volume 8 Issue 1)
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learning skills, as set out in the Classification of Learning
Skills (Apple, Beyerlein, Leise, & Baehr, 2007), to further
ensure their success as collegiate learners.
For the second edition of Foundations of Learning
(Krumsieg & Baehr 1999), based on the expressed needs
of a variety of colleges, the design of the activities was
improved, and additional content was integrated. A quick
yet fundamental redesign for the 3rd edition (Krumsieg
& Baehr, 2000) separated the activities book from the
content, such that each could be used alone.
A description of the purpose, key considerations, and
the critical components of such a course are found in the
Faculty Guidebook module, Designing a Foundations
Course (Newgren, 2007). As Newgren shares, one of
the most critical issues in creating a foundations course
is a strong commitment to its success on the part of both
administrators and faculty. Table 1 lists the stakeholders
to a foundations course, along with the roles they should
assume to ensure success for the course. Newgren’s
work led to the first formal course design document for
a Foundations of Learning course which was created at
Hinds Community College. That unpublished document
for an EDU 1203 course was upgraded in 2008 by Redfield
and Lawrence, even as they worked on authoring the 4th
edition of Foundations of Learning (2009); see Figure 1
The most current curriculum is a one or two-credit course,
Learning to Learn: Becoming a Self-Grower (Apple,
Morgan, & Hintze, 2013) which consists of 15 weekly
learning experiences designed to successfully counter the
most prevalent factors that put college success at risk for
many first-year students (Apple, Duncan, & Ellis, 2016).
Implementations
The first practical implementation of a Foundations of
Learning course was at St. Augustine College in Raleigh
NC, where the course was offered within their Learning
Communities Program. As part of this program, all
students attended a Learning to Learn Camp, and took
both a Foundations of Learning course in the fall and a
community service project course in the Spring (Knowles,
1995). The description of a very effective implementation
of a foundations course may be found in Enhancing a First-
Year Success Course Through Process Education (Jones &
Kilgore, 2012).
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