As educators who work with first-year students, we are all well aware of how difficult some students find the transition to college, particularly first-year engineering students. Of course, some students fail because they are ill prepared for the courses they are taking. Others are too easily distracted by their newfound freedoms. Nevertheless, there is a body of students whose ACT/SAT scores and high school grades suggest that they should easily adapt to the college environment, and yet some of these students do poorly. Our experience in teaching the integrated program suggests that these students experience difficulty in their freshman year because they feel threatened by the new learning environments, teaching methods, and demands that they are experiencing, and they often have problems adapting to these. In developing our ideas for integrated modules for the first-year program, we discovered that this notion of transition was important in all the classes. In English, for example, students need to abandon those techniques such as the "five-paragraph theme," which may have worked for them in the past. Similarly, in engineering, students need to abandon their linear problem-solving techniques that have worked in the past and allow themselves to spend more time on generating multiple solutions. Both changes are part of what we might call the "cultural literacies" of the subject ?that is, the "different sets of reading, writing, thinking, listening, and behavioral skills that make up the numerous communities of the academic world and beyond." Therefore, one of our writing assignments helps students transition to the cultural literacies involved in college. In this assignment, we ask students to examine the various changes they are experiencing and to determine the reasons they need to make these changes for success in their first-year courses. The assignment then asks students to internalize and apply those changes. In this paper, we will discuss the kinds of transitions students need to make, and we will explain how the assignment we have developed helps students to internalize those transitions.
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机译：识字和算术磁性图。白色磁性片，可轻松放置在白板上。各种类型的图表，包括大型写作图表，Andrewa的电磁数学表格和学生魔术写作图表。图表可以水平（600x900mm）或（250x200mm）或垂直（900mmx600mm）排列。写作图表用虚线表示。粗线为蓝色，虚线为红色。 Andrewa的Magnetic Math Grid由50x50mm的蓝色方块组成;网格为594x841mm，由十七行十一列组成。
