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The Neptune Academy: Honors Students Give Back, Douglas Corbitt, Allison Wallace, Corey Womack, Patrick Russell

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In August of 2008, two faculty members of the University of Central Arkansas Honors College were charged by their dean, Rick Scott, with designing a summer academy for local teens deemed to be at academic risk. The central goal of the program would be to offer selected honors college upperclassmen—beneficiaries of full-ride scholarships, compelling interdisciplinary seminars, and close faculty mentoring—an opportunity to share with struggling youngsters their pre-professional training as well as their own gifts of character and personality. Our hope was that the experience might serve as a meaningful intervention in the lives of adolescent students.

What resulted from …

The Last Class: Critical Thinking, Reflection, Course Effectiveness, And Student Engagement, Elizabeth Bleicher

Honors in Practice Online Archive

For the past four fall semesters, I have taught a first-year honors seminar to help talented incoming students establish purpose in college, take responsibility for their own education, and make the transition to college-level thinking and writing. My strategy in accomplishing these goals is asking students to analyze the systems through which youth in the United States are processed into college students. We spend fifteen weeks studying intersections of youth and student cultures, college honors populations, and U.S. secondary and higher education systems. The objective is to empower class members to become intentional learners who understand the purpose of liberal …

An Honors Alumni Mentor Program At Butler University, Jaclyn Dowd, Lisa Markus, Julie Schrader, Anne M. Wilson

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Butler University is a comprehensive master’s university of approximately 4,000 undergraduate students with five colleges: the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; the College of Education; the College of Business; the Jordan College of Fine Arts; and the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. The Butler University Honors Program is an interdisciplinary program open to undergraduates from all five colleges. Incoming students admitted to Butler who meet certain benchmark requirements (1320/30 or higher SAT/ACT or top five percent of graduating class) are invited to apply to our honors program. If students perform well in their first year at the university, …

Table Of Contents

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Vishnu Narain Bhatia

Editor’s Introduction • Ada Long

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

A Penny’s Worth of Reflections on Honors Education • John Zubizarreta

ON COLLABORATIVE COURSE PROJECTS

Into the Afterlife and Back with Honors Students • Kateryna A R Schray

The Last Class: Critical Thinking, Reflection, Course Effectiveness, and Student Engagement • Elizabeth Bleicher

Designing a Collaborative Blog about Student Success • Melissa L Johnson, Alexander S Plattner, and Lauren Hundley

ON CURRICULUM

Why Honors Students Still Need First-Year Composition • Annmarie Guzy

Rethinking Asian Studies in the …

Team Teaching On A Shoestring Budget, Jim Ford, Laura Gray

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Team teaching is an established pedagogical practice, particularly in honors education. Many institutions have long traditions of combining the gifts of multiple faculty in one honors course. For schools that lack such a tradition, however, securing the institutional resources to support team teaching can be a daunting obstacle. If team teaching is really a part of “The New Model Education,” as Gary Bell argues (57), can it be done on a shoestring budget? The Rogers State University Honors Program began in the fall of 2005 with an extremely tight budget and no money for compensating faculty. Despite this challenge, we …

Why Honors Students Still Need First-Year Composition, Annmarie Guzy

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Let me be among the first to welcome you to the honors program at Regional Public University. During your orientation today, you will be registering for your fall semester courses, and as you browse through the class listings, let me strongly recommend that you include first-year Honors Composition in your schedule even if you have taken AP English Literature and Composition or English Language and Composition courses and exams.

According to the College Board, the company that administers the Advanced Placement program, enrollment in AP has increased dramatically over the past decade. As you can see in Table 1 below, …

Designing A Collaborative Blog About Student Success, Melissa L. Johnson, Alexander S. Plattner, Lauren Hundley

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The term “web log,” or “blog,” was first coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger (Blood). Blogs have been used in education as online journals, discussion platforms, course websites, and alternatives to mainstream media publications (EDUCAUSE, 2005). Two of the more common blogging platforms, Wordpress and Blogger , are relatively simple to use, requiring no knowledge of HTML to post entries. One of the many advantages of using blogs is that they can foster interaction among peers, thereby building community (EDUCAUSE, 2005; Richardson). For further explanation of how blogs work, Common Craft has created an easy-to-follow video entitled Blogs in Plain …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Honors in Practice Online Archive

John Zubizarreta of Columbia College leads off this volume of Honors in Practice with a revised version of his presidential address at the 2010 annual NCHC conference in Kansas City, Missouri. His speech, entitled “A Penny’s Worth of Reflections on Honors Education,” was, in a characteristic honors mode, interactive. He asked the audience to participate with him in enacting the “challenge, risk, creativity, collaboration, reflection, inquiry, [and] community” of honors education. Zubizarreta, both in his speech and in this essay, describes and illustrates honors education, the NCHC, and its conferences as embodying the “rough magic” of Shakespeare’s Prospero.

Kateryna A. …

Into The Afterlife And Back With Honors Students, Kateryna Schray

Honors in Practice Online Archive

One of the best and funniest student evaluations I have ever received read: “if this professor taught a course on Hell and how to get there I would take it.” This generous compliment sounded like a good course idea, and a year or so later, Dr. Caroline Perkins and I successfully proposed an honors seminar called “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Literature and Culture.” Like other programs described in previous issues of Honors in Practice, the Marshall University Honors Program is built on team-taught interdisciplinary seminars— in this case Classics and English—and emphasizes student leadership and collaborative learning.

Presumably …

Self As Text: Adaptations Of Honors Practice, Michaela Ruppert Smith

Honors in Practice Online Archive

City as Text™, the experiential learning program developed by the NCHC Honors Semesters Committee, has been adopted and adapted by hundreds if not thousands of educational institutions throughout the United States and beyond. Having served on the Honors Semesters Committee, I exported this learning strategy to Switzerland when I took a teaching position in the International Baccalaureate Program of the Collège du Léman in Geneva. I adapted City as Text™ for multi-disciplinary college preparatory students in Europe, and that adaptation might now serve in turn as a model for experiential learning in honors programs and colleges back in the United …

Preparing A Master Plan For An Honors College, John R. Vile

Honors in Practice Online Archive

My experience as an honors dean, like my previous experience as a departmental chair, is that it is easier to spend time putting out fires than engaging in long-term planning. The myriad daily tasks tempt administrators to succumb to the “the tyranny of the now.” We almost always have classes to schedule and teach, books and articles to write and edit, students to advise, scholarship applications to proof, theses to read, special events to publicize, committee meetings to attend, building tours and speeches to give, students to recruit, conferences to attend, and numerous other worthy tasks that call for immediate …

Pod Network News, Winter 2011

POD Network News

No abstract provided.

Office Of Research And Economic Development Annual Report 2010-2011

Office of Research and Economic Development: Publications

Collaborations, Partnerships Drive Innovation 1

Discovery Could Spark Smaller, Faster Electronics 2

MRSEC Fosters Collaboration 3

Harnessing Laser Power Creates Precise Nanostructures 5

Nanohybrids Promise ‘Best of Both Worlds’ 6

Water for Food Institute Building Partnerships 8

World Water Expert to Lead Institute 9

Understanding Aquifer Recharge 10

Targeted Research Investments Hedge Against Food Crisis 11

Uncovering New Perspectives on Whitman 12

Civil War Washington Going Digital 14

Humanities Grants Support Language, Digital Initiatives 15

Improving Children’s Reading Comprehension 16

Transforming Early Childhood Education 17

Bullying: Filling Gaps Between Research, Practice 18

Preparing Military Kids for Success in School 19 …

Major Sponsored Programs And Faculty Awards For Research And Creative Activity: July 1, 2010 – June 30, 2011

Office of Research and Economic Development: Publications

This tenth annual “Major Sponsored Programs and Faculty Awards for Research and Creative Activity” booklet highlights the successes of University of Nebraska–Lincoln faculty during the fiscal year July 1, 2010-June 30, 2011. It lists the funding sources, projects and investigators on major grants and sponsored program awards received during the year; published books and scholarship; fellowships and other recognitions; startups and intellectual property licenses; and performances and exhibitions in the fine and performing arts. This impressive list grows each year and I am pleased to present evidence of our faculty’s accomplishments. Large grants in a diverse range of fields—from water, …

Macrocyclic Fragrance Materials—A Screening-Level Environmental Assessment Using Chemical Categorization, Daniel Salvito, Aurelia Lapczynski, Christen Sachse-Vasquez, Colin Mcintosh, Peter Calow, Helmut Greim, Beate Escher

Office of Research and Economic Development: Publications

A screening-level aquatic environmental risk assessment for macrocyclic fragrance materials using a “group approach” is presented using data for 30 macrocyclic fragrance ingredients. In this group approach, conservative estimates of environmental exposure and ecotoxicological effects thresholds for compounds within two subgroups (15 macrocyclic ketones and 15 macrocyclic lactones/lactides) were used to estimate the aquatic ecological risk potential for these subgroups. It is reasonable to separate these fragrance materials into the two subgroups based on the likely metabolic pathway required for biodegradation and on expected different ecotoxicological modes of action. The current volumes of use for the macrocyclic ketones in both …

Teachers’ Professional Development Through Integrating Ict In English Language Education: A Case From Pakistan, Ayesha Bashiruddin

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Ua3/9/2 I.T. Division Annual Report + Tactical Plan, Wku Information Technology

WKU Archives Records

Annual report of WKU Information Technology Division submitted to WKU President Gary Ransdell. Report is housed in UA3/9/2 Subject Files.

Memo To Departments: Outcomes Assessment Really Is A Good Idea, Wayne Jacobson

Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education: Archives

Outcomes Assessment has an image problem. For some people, it calls to mind standardized testing and centralized data collection systems. Others may think of file drawers full of unexamined reports. For many, it gets pictured alongside those other “A” words (accountability and accreditation) that they associate with satisfying someone else’s expectations. For some people, in some places, at some times, these are the kinds of images that outcomes assessment has evoked.

But these are not the only ways to see outcomes assessment, and it has never meant just those things. Outcomes assessment is first and foremost for departments: It helps …

Average Budgeted Salaries Of Faculty Staff 2011-2012, University Of Northern Iowa

Institutional Effectiveness & Planning Documents

Gives the average salaries of faculty broken down by rank and college and the distribution of salaries of the professional and scientific category.

How To Teach The Art Of “Doing” Research: Lessons Learnt From Teacher Education Program In Pakistan, Nilofar Vazir, Rashida Qureshi

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

No abstract provided.

Community College Student Engagement Patterns: A Typology Revealed Through Exploratory Cluster Analysis, Victor B. Sáenz, Deryl K. Hatch, Beth E. Bukoski, Suyun Kim, Kye-Hyoung Lee, Patrick Valdez

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

This study employs survey data from the Center for Community College Student Engagement to examine the similarities and differences that exist across student-level domains in terms of student engagement in community colleges. In total, the sample used in the analysis pools data from 663 community colleges and includes more than 320,000 students. Using data-mining techniques to discover a parsimonious number of natural clusters and, in turn, a k-means cluster analysis as a means of revealing a naturally occurring typology of engagement patterns, our findings reveal that support service utilization is the most distinguishing feature of the similarities and dissimilarities across …

Enhancing Undergraduate Education: Examining Faculty Experiences During Their First Year In A Residential College And Exploring The Implications For Student Affairs Professionals, Jody E. Jessup-Anger, Matthew R. Wawrzynski, Christina W. Yao

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

THIS QUALITATIVE STUDY EMPLOYED a constructivist, case study approach to explore how faculty made meaning of their experiences in a newly developed residential college at a large, land-grant research university in the Midwest. Findings revealed that faculty focused on determining how to prioritize the numerous opportunities for involvement while also working to define their unconventional roles as teaching-focused faculty at a research-extensive university. In reflecting on their first few months in the residential college, faculty discussed their appreciation of the collegiality of their peers. Finally, they described their role as collaborators with other faculty as they continued to lay the …

Forty Percent Of 2 Million: Preparing To Serve Our Veterans With Disabilities, Bruce C. Kelley, Emetta L. Fox, Justin M. Smith, Lisa A. Wittenhagen

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

On August 1, 2009, the Post-9111 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008 was passed, and as a result, almost 2 million veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will soon enroll in postsecondary education. Up to 40 percent of these veterans are estimated to have disabilities. This chapter examines some of the characteristics of this group, the challenges that veterans face as they transition into life as college students, and how faculty developers can help faculty better serve these incoming veterans.

The Digital Academy: Preparing Faculty For Digital Course Development, Sunay V. Palsole, Beth L. Brunk-Chavez

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

New generations of learners necessitate new ways of teaching, and hybrid courses can help institutions leverage technologies to improve teaching and learning. The adoption of a new instructional paradigm, however, requires attention to the facuity’s ability to create and deliver effective courses. The University of Texas at El Paso has developed the Digital Academy to help facuity interweave online elements with face-to-face teaching. The model is pliable and portable in its application to other universities.

Faculty Development As A Hazardous Occupation, Linda B. Nilson, Edward B. Nuhfer, Bonnie B. Mullinix

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

"Hazardous" describes events and conditions that produce an undesired, involuntary, career-changing disruption of a developer’s professional practice. While faculty development is an immensely valuable asset to an institution that knows how to make use of it, the unique nature off acuity development centers within varied academic institutions brings occupational hazards to those who direct or work in such centers. Our study synthesizes and identifies patterns among over thirty cases furnished by developers, primarily center directors, who experienced career disruptions. We conclude by offering evidence-based counsel on how to recognize the hazards and mitigate damage.

Effecting Change In Limited-Control Classroom Environments: A Case Study, Allison P. Boye

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Many instructors face the dilemma of possessing little control over their own curriculum or even their own pedagogy. This chapter examines three instructors who were teaching the same course over several years, facing the same problematic issues beyond their control, and describes the role of faculty developers in helping effect practical change for those instructors and for the course. The findings of this study, using longitudinal data derived from student evaluations and qualitative responses from instructor interviews, suggest that faculty developers can help instructors realize change on an individual level as well as at the department and big-picture levels.

About The Authors, Volume 29 (2011)

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

About the editors and authors of volume 29 (2011) of To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development.

Support Needs Of University Adjunct Lecturers, Sarah M. Ginsberg

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Little is known about the support needs of the part-time instructors on university campuses, despite the fact that they represent more than 50 percent of the instructors teaching in higher education. This study of adjunct lecturers investigated their support needs and their preferences for receiving support. Results indicated that adjuncts wanted information about their students and effective teaching methods beyond lecturing. They expressed frustration over the fact that there was no systematic approach to information sharing, particularly with the tenure-track faculty in their programs. They evenly favored resources provided either electronically or face-to-face.

Adapting A Laboratory Research Group Model To Foster The Scholarship Of Teaching And Learning, Beth A. Fisher, Regina F. Frey

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

A multidisciplinary group of faculty and staff formed an education research group modeled on a laboratory research group to focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This group has bridged the communication and knowledge gaps between STEM and social science faculty and science education specialists, fostered the development of collaborative SoTL projects, and laid the groundwork for broader institutional support of SoTL.

Using Students To Support Faculty Development, Teresa M. Redd, Carl E. Brown Jr.

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Howard University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (CETLA) provides faculty development for more than fifteen hundred facuity. Yet it is CETLA’s students who make the difference. They are both the motivation for improving teaching and the means to that end. Students have contributed to everything from the design of CETLA’s infrastructure, to the implementation of instructional technologies, to the assessment of student learning. Meanwhile, supporting faculty development has contributed to the students’ own development. A cost-benefit analysis as well as survey data confirms that working with students at CETLA is a win-win opportunity for the university, faculty, …