Last Updated: April 4, 2024

How do we spark student curiosity and desire to learn? How do we give our students the best opportunity to succeed at CSU? These were the questions that guided the creation of Inquiry Launch. For students to succeed in university, they need a sense of belonging, a belief in their own abilities, and the skills and strategies to succeed. Drawing on significant research into first year experience courses and consultation with stakeholders across CSU, the 3-credit hour Inquiry Launch was designed to replace the existing Introduction to University Life course by embedding its goals within a disciplinary context and empowering faculty to frame the course around engaging questions or problems.

While Inquiry Launch courses will be distinguished by their guiding questions and the disciplinary methodologies they emphasize, all will be united in their focus on achieving the four essential Inquiry Launch learning outcomes.

Below, you will find the following additional information:

• The Goals of Inquiry Launch courses
• Recommended & Required activities to achieve each learning outcome
• Suggestions for how to think about designing an Inquiry Launch course
• The motivation for and research underpinnings of Inquiry Launch

Inquiry Launch Goals

The four Inquiry Launch learning outcomes are aimed at achieving the following broader goals:

• Promote student belonging through introducing students to university resources (LO1, LO3)
• Develop students’ academic skills through deliberate and regular practice (LO2, LO3)
• Spark student intellectual curiosity (LO4)
• Engage students in the production of knowledge through collaborative inquiry (LO4)

Inquiry Launch courses must be intentionally designed with these goals and the associated learning outcomes in mind. Achievement of these goals should not be seen as an “add on” to a course in your discipline, but rather as central to the course. The disciplinary content should be secondary, functioning more as a tool for achieving these goals and outcomes.

A common rule of thumb used in the design of courses like Inquiry Launch is that you should cut about 50% of the content from a standard introductory survey course.

Learning Outcome Activities

There will be many ways to achieve the Inquiry Launch learning outcomes, and the hope is that faculty will think creatively about how best to achieve the outcomes given the focus of their course and discipline. But we also want to assist faculty in ensuring they can help students achieve the outcomes. Below you will find each outcome listed, followed by a series of potential activities or approaches one may take to help achieve the outcomes. Those in bold are required activities. The Director of Core Curriculum will also be working with First Year Experience staff and others across the university to produce assignment templates and more fully worked out activities that you may use.

1. Students will be able to identify themselves as members of the CSU community
   • Helping students to choose and navigate a major program (or curriculum generally)
   • Including a strong focus on Health & Wellness (Mental, physical, and relational) that also introduces students to relevant campus resources
   • Investigating what is important for achieving a healthy “school-work-life” balance
   • Activities focused on navigating the city of Cleveland
   • Focusing on students’ social engagement by helping them connect with student organizations & community activities
2. Students will be able to engage in personal and academic goal setting
   • Explicitly instruct students in effective goal-setting in college and beyond
   • Engage students in self-exploration and personal development strategies
   • Including a strong focus on personal goal setting/habit formation alongside a discussion of resilience/perseverance strategies
   • Investigating the importance of embracing a “growth mindset” in college
   • Activities focused on financial literacy, time management, etc.
   • Focusing on the importance of professional communication, including how to set up and send professionals emails with signatures & attachments
3. Students will be able to strategically deploy effective college success strategies and utilize university resources
   • Introduce students to library resources and work with a librarian on information literacy/library research skills
   • Introduce students to key academic skills (such as note-taking) early in the semester, and use the initial disciplinary learning as the medium for practicing those skills throughout the semester
   • Engage students/student teams in meaningful projects related to the focus of the course and use this as an opportunity for active learning of university resources
   • Investigating the traits of successful students, leaders, & collaborators
   • Activities focused on note-taking, effective reading, and general study strategies
   • Focusing on the importance of academic integrity and the responsible use of resources
   • Explicit instruction in the value and limitations of generative AI
4. Students will be able to engage effectively with diverse others to investigate complex issues and propose a way forward
   • Where possible, explicitly link disciplinary learning to essential elements of Inquiry Launch. Where this is not possible, break up disciplinary learning with other elements (such as those suggested for CLOs1-3) as appropriate.
   • Organize students into teams early in the semester, then engage them in explicit team-building strategies (such as creating team contracts) and have them work in these teams regularly throughout the semester
   • Structure team activities and/or projects and explicitly engage students in effective strategies of collaboration and project management
   • Investigating how new knowledge is produced, especially within your discipline
   • Activities focused on collaborating across differences and embracing complexity
   • Focusing on the importance of information literacy, problem solving, & conflict management/resolution

Designing an Inquiry Launch Course

While there is no singular right way to design an Inquiry Launch course, there are some common suggestions that are worth keeping in mind.

• Be innovative in your focus. While all courses in the Inquiry Core should spark student curiosity by emphasizing questions and problems of interest to first-year students, the Inquiry Launch courses should especially embrace the innovation.
• Embrace the narrow topical focus by finely curating the learning experience. You should not feel any obligation to cover a certain amount or type of disciplinary content in an Inquiry Launch course, which should liberate you to engage students in unique ways.
• Design for collaboration. Students develop a sense of belonging in large part from interacting with classroom peers. Engage students in collaborative exercises, activities, and consider focusing the course on a collaborative project. Set aside class time for students to collaborate, rather than asking them to find time to meet outside of class.
• A common “rule of thumb” for these sorts of courses is to take a standard introductory course in your discipline and cut about 50% of the content to ensure sufficient time for students to learn about university resources and develop their academic skills.
• Think about how you can tie together explicit instruction in foundational academic skills – reading, note-taking, goal setting, etc. – with the disciplinary focus of the course. For instance, consider including an early introduction to a note-taking technique followed by regular note-taking assignments.
• Work to identify synergies between key university resources – the library, the writing center, TASC, etc. – and work you may have students do in the course. For instance, consider tasking students with completing an annotated bibliography on some topic and pair that assignment with a visit to the library that introduces students to the use of research databases and other library resources.

Why Inquiry Launch?

The Inquiry Core Curriculum replaces the existing 1-credit hour Introduction to University Life first year experience course with a 3-credit hour Inquiry Launch course requirement. The fundamental goal of this change is to better meet our incoming students where they are and support them in becoming a full member of the CSU community and succeeding throughout their university career.

Research on First Year Experience courses have generally produced the following conclusions:

• 3 credit hour First Year Experience courses are much more effective than courses requiring fewer credit hours, especially for the most academically vulnerable. Achievement gaps between the academically most vulnerable and other students was nearly eliminated when a 3 credit hour FYE course was used.^[1]
• FYE courses that combine the teaching of academic strategies with disciplinary content have a statistically significant effect on student success, while FYE courses that only teach success strategies without academic content do not. One study showed up to a 20% benefit to persistence and graduation rates for first-generation students and students of color, compared to no FYE course at all.^[2]
• While there are different approaches to First Year Seminars, “hybrid approaches” which combine academic content and extended orientation elements were found to be most effective.^[3]

Additionally, the design of the Inquiry Launch course also helped us achieve additional important goals, such as:

• Better promote student belonging through more regular contact with the instructor and peers in the first-year experience course.
• Make it possible for the First Year Experience course to count toward the ODHE minimum 36-credit hour general education requirements by meeting OT-36 learning outcomes.
• Make it possible for students to begin an Inquiry Pathway journey through an Inquiry Launch course.