The Impact of Early Course Experiences on Student Choices

Students rarely wait until they feel competent to decide whether a subject is right for them. Instead, they rely on early impressions, often before they have any real exposure to how the work is done beyond the classroom.

Those impressions form through:

• 📌 How well first labs or assignments go
• 📌 How work is demonstrated
  
• 📌 How expectations are explained
  
• 📌 How mistakes are addressed
  
  
  

A difficult early experience does not automatically lead to poor outcomes. But when difficulty is paired with uncertainty, students may conclude that the field itself is not for them. In many cases, early coursework stands in for real-world experience, shaping how students imagine what continuing in the subject would feel like.

Early subject experiences act as filters, not just learning steps.

Many experiences that shape student decisions may seem minor from an instructor’s perspective.

A rushed demonstration, an unclear setup, or instructions that assume prior familiarity. These moments are easy to overlook when designing a course, but they can have lasting effects on how students perceive a subject.

Research on student persistence shows that confidence and sense of belonging strongly influence whether students continue in a discipline.¹ When early experiences feel confusing without context, confidence can drop quickly.

This is not about lowering standards, but about reducing avoidable friction so that effort is focused on learning, not interpretation.

Early difficulty on its own does not push students away. What matters more is whether that difficulty is explained and placed in context.

When students can’t see how work is carried out in practice, they may assume they are missing something basic, that others understand more than they do, or that the challenge reflects a lack of fit rather than a normal part of learning.

Clearer experiences help students interpret challenges more accurately. They make it easier to recognize mistakes as part of the process rather than as evidence that they don’t belong.

This distinction is especially important in subjects that already feel abstract or unfamiliar.

Across education and training research, demonstrations support understanding of complex, multistep tasks.² This support is not limited to skill development. It also affects how learners judge their own progress.

Seeing how work is carried out in context helps clarify expectations. It shows what typical performance looks like at each stage and makes it easier to understand where errors fit into the process. This context can be hard to infer from written instructions alone, especially in subjects that involve unfamiliar tools or workflows.

In research settings, gaps in procedural clarity are linked to reproducibility challenges.³ In teaching, similar gaps affect how students interpret early experiences. 

When key steps or decisions are invisible, students may focus more on what feels confusing than on what they are learning. The goal is to provide enough visibility for students to understand what they are being asked to do and why.

Clear early subject experiences help students make better-informed choices. They allow students to judge whether a field aligns with their interests and goals, rather than reacting to confusion or misinterpretation.

For faculty, this highlights the broader role of early courses. They do more than introduce content. They show students what learning and practice in a discipline actually look like. Even small changes in how work is shown or explained can influence how students interpret their experience and whether they see a future in the subject.

Students will continue to form judgments early, often based on limited information. While faculty cannot control every factor that influences these decisions, we can shape how clearly work is introduced and how accessible early experiences feel.

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1. Tinto, V. (2017). Through the eyes of students. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 19(3), 254–269.
   https://doi.org/10.1177/1521025115621917 
2. Renkl, A., Atkinson, R. K., Maier, U. H., & Staley, R. (2002). From example study to problem solving: Smooth transitions help learning. Educational Psychologist, 37(1), 15–29. https://doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.8816  
3. Baker, M. (2016). 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility. Nature, 533(7604), 452–454. https://doi.org/10.1038/533452a