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The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of orientation programs on student academic and social learning. Moving beyond previous studies, we examined how participation in orientation programming affected student learning and how the impact of these programs on learning varied by organizational characteristics (i.e., institutional control, size of undergraduate enrollment, sponsoring division, and whether the institution has an office designated for managing orientation programs), student entry characteristics (i.e., gender, race, transfer status), and student experiences (i.e., perceived quality of orientation program in helping student transition and in meeting students' expectations, positive experiences with orientation staff, and perceptions of orientation programs and their efficacy in helping students navigate resources and in providing useful campus-based information). Hierarchical linear analysis was used to analyze these crosslevel effects. Results demonstrated that having a designated office for orientation programs on campus was important for narrowing the academic learning gap between new-first year and transfer students. Implications for researchers and practitioners were discussed.

College instructors use a variety of approaches to teach students to reason more effectively about issues with a moral dimension and achieve mixed results. This pre-post study of 423 undergraduate students examined the effects of morally explicit and implicit curricular content and of selected pedagogical strategies on moral reasoning development. Using causal modelling to control for a range of student background variables as well as Time 1 scores, 52% of the variance in moral reasoning scores was explained; we found that these scores were affected by type of curricular content and by three pedagogical strategies (active learning, reflection and facultystudent interaction). Students who experienced more negative interactions with diverse peers were the least likely to show positive change in moral reasoning as a result of participating in any course. Implications for the design of intervention studies are discussed, including the need to attend to selection and attenuation effects.