Shaping the First-Year Experience: Assessment of the Vision Planning Seminar at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business in Japan

Learning assessment of the First-Year Experience (FYE) at universities has increasingly drawn attention. Despite its current popularity, few pieces of literature on the FYE learning assessment exist in Japan. To present a case of FYE in the context of Japan, this paper examines the FYE course called the Vision Planning Seminar (VPS) at the Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (NUCB). The university created a unique FYE called the Vision Planning Seminar for Industrial Needs (VPSIN) in an attempt to reduce attrition, develop students’ generic skills, which also serve for developing employability. This paper examines whether VPSIN helps students stay at university, acquire generic skills and envision their futures compared to other VPS. Findings show that whereas VPSIN possibly helps students stay at university, the program does not seem to help improve generic skills and envision future career perspectives. The author suggests that the VPSIN curriculum be redesigned to more directly focus on helping students with vision planning and the survey interview questions be revised for future studies to examine how VPSIN could help students improve specific generic skills.