Higher Education Commons^™

Critical College Experiences Of The Middle Third Of The High School Graduating Class, Nathan Kaoru Keikiokamakua Hanamaikai

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Seven recent graduates from a large, open access university in the Western United States who also graduated from high school in the middle third of their graduating class were interviewed to examine what they considered critical decisions during college and what effect those decisions had on their progress towards graduation. More than 45 critical incidents were identified by the participants. All incidents involved interaction with another person to some degree. All but 11 of the incidents were with people outside of institutional employees. Of the 11 incidents, the majority involved faculty members in either positive or negative situations. Upon further …

An Empirical Typology Of The Latent Programmatic Structure Of Community College Student Success Programs, Deryl K. Hatch, E. Michael Bohlig

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

The definition and description of student success programs in the literature (e.g., orientation, first-year seminars, learning communities, etc.) suggest underlying programmatic similarities. Yet researchers to date typically depend on ambiguous labels to delimit studies, resulting in loosely related but separate research lines and few generalizable findings. To demonstrate whether or how certain programs are effective there is need for more coherent conceptualizations to identify and describe programs. This is particularly problematic for community colleges where success programs are uniquely tailored relative to other sectors. The study’s purpose is to derive an empirical typology of community college student success programs based …

Assessing Growth Of Student Reasoning Skills In Honors, Jeanneane Wood-Nartker, Shelly Hinck, Ren Hullender

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Assessment and evaluation practices within honors programs have attracted considerable attention within the honors academic community, e.g., the spring/summer 2006 volume of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council. Calls for carefully created and constructed assessment activities within honors programs have met with mixed responses by directors who identify the difficulty in assessing decentralized, complex learning environments, noting that standard measures such as tests, surveys, or essays are not always applicable or appropriate in addressing honors assessment needs, especially in areas of social justice, service learning, and community engagement (Corley & Zubizarreta; Lanier). Acknowledging the hesitancy of honors directors …

From Orientation Needs To Developmental Realities: The Honors First-Year Seminar In A National Context, Anton Vander Zee, Trisha Folds-Bennett, Elizabeth Meyer-Bernstein, Brendan Reardon

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The transition into college remains one of the most formative and complex phases in an individual’s life. Institutions of higher learning have responded to the challenges facing first-year students in myriad ways, most often by offering summer orientation programs, dynamic living-learning environments, tailored academic and psychological support services, and dedicated first-year seminars (FYSs) that seek to engage students in a range of curricular and co-curricular experiences. FYSs—courses intended to enhance the academic skills and/or social development of first-year college students—have become the curricular anchors grounding this broad array of programming. While addressing the developmental needs of first-year students is the …

An Agenda For The Future Of Research In Honors, George Mariz

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Research in honors has become a priority for the National Collegiate Honors Council, and the phrase presents the honors community with an interesting ambiguity about the appropriate focus for future studies. Potential topics might include the progress of honors students in comparison to their non-honors cohorts; the criteria for selecting honors faculty; and the relationship between honors and its institutional context. The best methodologies might include statistical studies, qualitative analyses, or both. Future research in honors might reflect past practices or set a new trend in both topics and methodologies. As the NCHC launches its next fifty years, the time …

Variability And Similarity In Honors Curricula Across Institution Size And Type, Andrew J. Cognard-Black, Hallie Savage

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As Samuel Schuman argues in his seminal introduction to honors administration, “The single most important feature of any honors program is its people: the students who learn there and the faculty who teach them” (33). Next, argues Schuman, comes the curriculum; the context of the learning that takes place when honors faculty and honors students come together is framed by the curriculum. Honors curricula provide opportunities for honors students to endeavor challenges beyond what traditional undergraduate curricula provide. For faculty, honors is a unique opportunity to blend research and teaching and to provide a curricular laboratory for experimenting with varied …

Toward A Science Of Honors Education, Beata M. Jones

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As Sam Schuman wrote in 2004 and as George Mariz points out in his lead essay for this issue of JNCHC, the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) and academics alike have long recognized the importance of research in honors. Cambridge Dictionary Online defines “research” as “a detailed study of a subject in order to discover information or achieve a new understanding of it.” Given the roots of U.S. honors in the liberal arts, U.S. practitioners who have written for JNCHC have often been driven by the research models of their home disciplines. With fifteen years’ worth of publications, JNCHC contains …

Writing Instruction And Assignments In An Honors Curriculum: Perceptions Of Effectiveness, Edward J. Caropreso, Mark Haggerty, Melissa Ladenheim

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Learning to write well is a significant outcome of higher education, as confirmed and illustrated in the Written Communication VALUE Rubric of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). Bennett notes that writing well is a singularly important capability, indicating that virtually all higher education programs intend for students to write better when they graduate than when they enrolled. Moskovitz refers to an AAC&U survey of member institutions in which writing topped the list of learning outcomes for all students.

Scholars agree that writing and thinking are linked. Oatley and Djikic discuss how writing externalizes thinking by using various …

Demography Of Honors: Comparing Nchc Members And Non-Members, Patricia J. Smith, Richard I. Scott

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Recent research describing the landscape of honors education has demonstrated that honors programs and colleges have become an important and expanding component of American higher education. Since its inception nearly a century ago, collegiate honors education offering campus-wide curricula has spread to more than 1,500 non-profit colleges and universities (Scott and Smith, “Demography”). NCHC has served as the umbrella organization for the collegiate honors community during a fifty-year period in which the number of known programs delivering honors education has experienced a more than four-fold increase (Rinehart; Scott and Smith, “Demography”).

In 2012, NCHC undertook systematic research of its member …

Helping The Me Generation Decenter: Service Learning With Refugees, Louanne B. Hawkins, Leslie G. Kaplan

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Recent research has empirically demonstrated that young adults today are different from prior generations in their decreased empathy, increased narcissism, and decreased civic engagement. The formative years of young adulthood are a critical period for the development of civic values and civil ideologies, a time when college-age adults need to acquire the experiences and skills to decenter and develop into civic-minded stewards of their communities. Engagement in service learning with individuals unlike themselves, i.e., outgroup members, is the approach we have taken at the University of North Florida to encourage this decentering through service learning engagement with refugees embedded in …

The Challenges Of Promoting Instructional Improvement: Teaching Behaviors And Teaching Cultures At Liberal Arts Institutions In The Associated Colleges Of The South, Kent Andersen, Barbara Lom, Betsy A. Sandlin

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

One goal of faculty development is to improve instructional practice (McKee, Johnson, Ritchie, and Tew, 2013; Ouellett 2010; Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, and Beach, 2006). This goal accords with the design of the Associated Colleges of the South Teaching and Learning Workshop, a faculty development workshop begun in 1992 for 16 residential, liberal arts institutions that comprise the ACS consortium. We surveyed ACS faculty members and observed that they are most likely to engage independently rather than collaboratively to improve their instructional practice, despite stated desires for collaborative opportunities for such work. We recommend that faculty development programs and institutions promote …

Receive, Reorganize, Return: Theatre As Creative Scholarship, Sara Armstrong, Theresa Braunschneider

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This article focuses on the use of theatre as a mode of creative scholarship, from the research involved in sketch creation to the presentation of that research to academic audiences. We particularly focus on a specific sketch developed by the CRLT Players—one that explores the consequences of subtle discrimination faced by women scientists in research laboratory settings— to illustrate the ways in which theatre can engage audiences with research results. The article explains how participation in such performances promotes a more active exploration of scholarship than simply reading or hearing a presentation. Interactive theatre directs and focuses an audience’s attention …

Designing An Evaluation Of Instructional Consultation In A Higher Education Context, Karen Elizabeth Brinkley Etzkorn, David Schumann, Beth White, Tiffany Smith

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Individual instructor consultation is a common service provided by centers focused on educational development in higher education. The importance of this service has been reflected in its history, increasing demand, and strong anecdotal evidence to its effectiveness. However, the extant literature reveals that comprehensive assessment of consultation effectiveness has proved challenging. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to (a) provide an overview of consultation and summarize the relevant work evaluating this service, and (b) propose a comprehensive process for evaluating consultation services that was piloted at one large research intense university. The goal is to provide a systematic method …

Connect, Change, And Conserve: Building A Virtual Center For Teaching Excellence, Anne M. Schoening, Sarah Oliver

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

In an era of limited fiscal and human resources, educational developers are seeking innovative ways to connect with their constituents. Developing a “virtual” center for teaching and learning (CTL) is one approach to consolidating development resources and reaching busy full time and adjunct faculty. This article will describe the process used to create and sustain a Virtual Center for Teaching Excellence (vCTE) at a diverse, mid sized university campus. This process required connection between departmental faculty developers and stakeholders, change of the campus mindset, and conservation of resources through shared efforts. Challenges faced and recommendations to overcome those challenges will …

Institutionalizing Faculty Mentoring Within A Community Of Practice Model, Emily R. Smith, Patricia E. Calderwood, Stephanie Burrell Storms, Paula Gill Lopez, Ryan P. Colwell

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

In higher education, faculty work is typically enacted—and rewarded—on an individual basis. Efforts to promote collaboration run counter to the individual and competitive reward systems that characterize higher education. Mentoring initiatives that promote faculty collaboration and support also defy the structural and cultural norms of higher education. Collaborative mentoring initiatives, however, support all faculty to be lifelong learners. We analyze a reciprocal model of mentoring—a community of practice for mentoring—that integrates collaborative mentoring into faculty’s daily work. Additionally, we examine the dilemmas, benefits, and costs of institutionalizing a community of practice model for mentoring in higher education. Our analyses indicate …

Good, Fast, Cheap: How Centers Of Teaching And Learning Can Capitalize In Today’S Resource Constrained Context, Michael H. Truong, Stephanie Juillerat, Deborah H. C. Gin

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

This article provides leaders and educational developers of Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTL) with innovative and practical strategies on how to increase their centers’ capacity and impact by focusing on quality, efficiency, and cost. This “good, fast, cheap” model represents a promising way that CTL can continue to grow, scale, and innovate in the midst of limited resources. By leveraging existing campus resources, external vendor products, and low cost technologies, CTL are able to remain effective and impactful, without compromising quality or requiring abundant resources. This article will include real use case examples from a CTL at a mid …

Don’T Box Me In: Rubrics For Ártists And Designers, Natasha Haugnes, Jennifer L. Russell

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Two faculty developers at a professional art and design university were met with uneasy faculty attitudes toward grading when they opened their CTL 13 years ago. Conversations revealed that the faculty artists and designers suspected that grading would somehow shatter the fragile muse of creativity, which is so central to the processes of producing art and design. The developers’ quest for transparent, consistent grading, and assessment practices resulted in an approach to rubric creation that taps into artists’ reverence for the critique. This narrative account reveals how the approach allowed an interactive introduction of rubrics as teaching tools, ensured their …

Subjectivities In The Sandbox: Discovering Biases Through Visual Memo Writing, Bethany Lisi

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

Having insider status at an organization under study can present a researcher with benefits and challenges. Insider researchers may have access to honest dialogue with study participants but may also be vulnerable to uncomfortable conversations and organizational conflicts. Insider researchers also have to contend with their own biases they bring to a study. By using the reflexive practice of memo writing, insider researchers can be mindful of their own subjectivities during data collection and analysis. The purpose of this article is to share one approach to memo writing that incorporates visuals into the analysis and reflection. Through my use of …

University Of Nebraska- Lincoln: Fact 2015-2016

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Administration: Papers, Publications, and Presentations

Table of Contents

Front Cover.................................................................. 1

Introduction.......................................................................... 2

Table of Contents ....................................................... 3

General Information

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Core Values (LEADERS) ................................... 6

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Mission ............................................................. 7

The Missions of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln ........................................... 7

Teaching......................................................................................................... 8

Research................................................................................................... 8

Service....................................................................................................... 9

Institutional and Professional Accreditations .................................................... 10

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Administrative Organization Chart .................. 14

Student Credit Hours (SCH)

Total SCH: Fall Semester Since 1979 ................................................................ 15

Total SCH: Spring Semester Since 1993 .......................................................... 16

SCH by College and Course Level, Fall and Spring Semester, 5 Year Trend ..... 17

SCH by College and Course Level, Fall …