Many researchers highlight performance as one of the factors of first-year students’ effective adaptation. The relevance of the studied problem lies in the fact that students having good results of final exams in a comprehensive school face challenges while adapting to the university. In order to ease the process of moving from the usual regular school life to a university period, we offered first-year students a special educational course of study "Introduction to Learning". We tried to determine whether the study of the special course "Introduction to Learning" by first-year students will affect the results of their training during the adaptation period. The leading research method for this problem is comparative analysis which let us identify if the course “Introduction to Learning”, included in the curriculum, affects the learning outcomes during the first semester of the first-year students' adaptation period. Comparing the first semester grades of the groups studied the proposed course, and the groups which did not study one, we received the following results: students of the experimental groups showed higher results in the first half of the year. Our special course supported the process of adaptation by students of the first year and their successful educational process. The developed syllabus of the course “Introduction to Learning” is aimed at preparing students for study in new conditions of a university and at improving learning outcomes of first-year students in the first semester of the adaptation period.

adaptation, first-year students, assessment, academic performance, study course