What do first-year university students in Newfoundland and Labrador know about Aboriginal peoples and topics?

This paper delivers the results from a quantitative analysis of the Assessing Student Awareness of Indigenous Peoples survey carried out in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2013. The results suggest that most students are substantially unaware of Aboriginal people including their presence (geography), their cultural continuity (history), the laws structuring their conditions of life (governance), current events, and their cultures. Most students entering Memorial University learn what they know from the K-12 curriculum, which is woefully inadequate-although where the curriculum is strong students do perform better, suggesting that curricular and text reform could make a large difference. This paper is the first in a two-part series in which we focus first on quantitative results and then a discourse analysis of students' words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]