Education Commons^™

Adding Value Through Honors At The University Of Iowa: Effects Of A Pre-Semester Honors Class And Honors Residence On First-Year Students, Art L. Spisak, Robert F. Kirby, Emily M. Johnson

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Activities that take place early in students’ college career can strongly influence their academic engagement and success. Two experiences that honors programs may provide during the initial phases of the undergraduate experience are pre- or earlysemester programs and honors residence halls. This study compares honors students who lived in an honors residence hall and/or took part in a pre-semester academic, credit-bearing class upon entry into college to their honors peers who did not elect these options. It tracks the degree of the students’ subsequent engagement with the honors program and also several measures of their academic success, such as grade …

Contributions Of Small Honors Programs: The Case Of A Public Liberal Arts College, George Smeaton, Margaret Walsh

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The Keene State College Honors Program began as the vision of a former college president to attract more high-achieving students to this particular public liberal arts college. In the fall of 2007, after the college had secured initial funding, a small cohort of twenty first-year students were selected for the honors program by admissions staff for their achievements and promise. The numbers were intentionally small, but the goals were ambitious for a rural college that serves a high percentage of first-generation college students (43%). The students selected for admission into honors would enroll in an honors-level writing course and live …

Honors Value Added: Where We Came From, And What We Need To Know Next, Hallie E. Savage

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The pressure is on, and growing greater when it comes to defining, disseminating, and defending the value of higher education generally and the reasons for funding it (Harnisch 2011). Complaints abound regarding the rising costs of higher education, and many legislators and the public are demanding accountability. Funding cuts are forcing many colleges and universities to prioritize and to evaluate what merits support and what does not. As a part of a large array of undergraduate programs, honors programs and honors colleges face increasingly greater pressure to justify their existence.

That said, honors programs and colleges are in a good …

High-Impact Honors Practices: Success Outcomes Among Honors And Comparable High-Achieving Non-Honors Students At Eastern Kentucky University, Katie Patton, David Coleman, Lisa W. Kay

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Alexander Astin’s Inputs-Environment-Outcomes (I-E-O) model for longitudinal study of student success in higher education challenges researchers to account explicitly for the wide range of educational, social, and cultural backgrounds that students bring with them to college. Astin’s approach factors in an understanding that educational outcomes are associated not only with the various educational environments to which students are exposed during their college years, but also with the inputs of these students—the factors that shaped them long before they first arrived in a university classroom. Meaningful conclusions concerning factors that contribute to student success must take into account the complex interactions …

Gpa As A Product, Not A Measure, Of Success In Honors, Lorelle A. Meadows, Maura Hollister, Mary Raber, Laura Kasson Fiss

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Defining success is challenging. Yet schools and colleges across the country, indeed, around the world, seek to do it in order to demonstrate value. While we know that success depends upon a variety of skills that individuals develop into competencies, these can be difficult to measure in an academic setting. For example, as educators, we hope that success is an outcome of lifelong learning, but the measurement of lifelong learning requires sophisticated approaches that can be difficult to deploy across a broad population (Riley and Claris 2008). As a result, administrators and instructors will often gravitate toward more readily available …

Community College Honors Benefits: A Propensity Score Analysis, Jane B. Honeycutt

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

According to Morgan and Badenhausen (2015), honors education began in the United States in 1921 when Frank Ayedelotte became president of Swarthmore College. At that time, Ayedelotte initiated an interdisciplinary curriculum that stressed critical thinking and active learning. Almost a century later, the National Collegiate Honors Council (2013) defines honors education in terms true to Ayedelotte’s original vision:

Honors education is characterized by in-class and extracurricular activities that are measurably broader, deeper, or more complex than comparable learning experiences . . . [and] honors experiences include a distinctive learnerdirected environment and philosophy. (para. 2)

Similar to four-year university honors programming, …

Demonstrating The Value Of Honors: What Next?, Jerry Herron

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Our professional organization, the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), has provided a good general definition of honors education while at the same time recognizing the “diversity of honors experiences across many institutions of higher learning.” Here’s how the definition reads, in part, from the NCHC website:

Honors education is characterized by in-class and extracurricular activities that are measurably broader, deeper, or more complex than comparable learning experiences typically found at institutions of higher education. (NCHC 2013)

Honors Education Has A Positive Effect On College Student Success, Dulce Diaz, Susan P. Farruggia, Meredith E. Wellman, Bette L. Bottoms

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Over 1,500 U.S. universities and colleges have honors programs or honors colleges to provide extra support for their most prepared students (National Collegiate Honors Council 2018; Scott and Smith 2016). Honors programs typically provide additional financial support, faculty mentors, smaller class sizes, and other benefits compared to what institutions can typically offer all of their students. Students involved in an honors program usually earn higher GPAs compared to highly motivated students not in an honors program (Pritchard and Wilson 2003) and are more likely to stay in college and graduate within four years (Cosgrove 2004).

The additional success of honors …

Introduction: The Demonstrable Value Of Honors Education, Andrew J. Cognard-Black

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In May of 2016, a small cadre of scholars was called to the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, for the Honors Education Research Colloquium, a two-day meeting focusing on the future direction of research in honors education. The participants were assembled by Jerry Herron, who at the time was president of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), close on the heels of a decision by the NCHC Board of Directors in June of the previous year to make research—along with professional development and advocacy—one of three strategic priorities.

After a day of presentations, in turn, by each …

The Value Added Of Honors Programs In Recruitment, Retention, And Student Success: Impacts Of The Honors College At The University Of Mississippi, Robert D. Brown, Jonathan Winburn, Douglass Sullivan-González

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In a recent essay, M. Roy Wilson (2015), President of Wayne State University, and Jerry Herron, Dean of the Honors College, discuss the value added of honors programs in terms that should be familiar to numerous constituencies associated with honors education. Wilson and Herron write about honors education largely in terms of the experiences it provides students:

the [honors] college is not tied to any particular academic discipline; instead, it represents the virtues of a liberal education that reaches across departments, schools, and colleges. For our students, the aim is to integrate the specialized—and essential—knowledge of the disciplines into a …

Proving The Value Of Honors Education:The Right Data And The Right Messaging, Bette L. Bottoms, Stacie L. Mccloud

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Administered within over 1,500 honors colleges and programs in two- and four-year institutions worldwide (National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) 2017; Scott and Smith 2016; Wolfensberger 2015), honors education serves the best interests of students and adds quality to the academic mission of host institutions by promoting the highest intellectual standards. Necessarily differing in form and content, all honors programs and colleges share the goals of identifying and supporting the most talented students as they achieve success in college and as they learn how to prepare not only for successful careers, but also for lifelong learning and meaningful civic engagement (Humphrey …

History And Current Practices Of Assessment To Demonstrate Value Added, Patricia J. Smith

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

With more than 1,500 honors programs currently in operation and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent throughout American institutions, external pressure is building for accountability in honors programs (Scott and Smith 2016). Today’s society “expects colleges and universities to graduate students who can get things done in the world and are prepared for effective and engaged citizenship” (Keeling et al. 2004:5). Doyle (2004) also has noted the increasing scrutiny of higher education:

the attention given to higher education’s success at fostering student learning has increased in recent years. The rapidly rising cost of higher education and the increased attention …