Liberal Studies Commons^™

Using Minecraft To Integrate Common Core Activities Across Elementary School Curriculum, William A J Couling

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Minecraft, an open world sandbox game rich with educational possibility, has been a growing sensation among elementary age children across the US. Though there has been some experimentation in a number of schools across the United States, there has been no mass movement to embracing Minecraft as a virtual learning environment. With advances in the fields of Virtual Learning Environments and the new wave of educational thinking known as the “Maker Movement,” the modern educational field has an opportunity for radical new ways of teaching. Using an elementary school as a model in the Monterey Bay area, I surveyed a …

Steam In Arabia, Troy Bickham

The STEAM Journal

In late 2014 Texas A&M University at Qatar, which is a small branch campus focusing on engineering, launched its own STEAM initiative. Its goals are to better integrate the liberal arts into the engineering curriculum and to demonstrate the relevance of the arts to STEM-based education and research. What follows is a description of the initiative and the reception it has received.

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016) [Complete Issue]

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In This Issue

Forum Articles

AP, Dual Enrollment, and the Survival of Honors Education •Annmarie Guzy

Rethinking Honors Curriculum in Light of the AP/IB/Dual Enrollment Challenge: Innovation and Curricular Flexibility •David Coleman and Katie Patton

Using Hybrid Courses to Enhance Honors Offerings in the Disciplines •Karen D. Youmans

A Dual Perspective on AP, Dual Enrollment, and Honors •Heather C. Camp and Giovanna E. Walters

Got AP? •Joan Digby

AP: Not a Replacement for Challenging College Coursework •Margaret Walsh

Research Essays

The ICSS and the Development of Black Collegiate Honors Education …

Front Matter, Vol. 17, No. 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Cover

Mast Head

Contents

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication - Dail W. Mullins Jr.

2016-2017 Undergraduate Academic Catalog, Cedarville University

Undergraduate Academic Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Vol. 17, No. 1

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Cover

Mast Head

Contents

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy

Submission Guidelines

Dedication - Richard Badenhausen

Confessions Of A Media Literacy Scholar-Practitioner: Job Market Advantages, Research Agenda Challenges, And Theory-Driven Production, Christopher Boulton

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This essay explores how higher education’s move away from the liberal arts tradition of learning by thinking and towards more vocational “experiential” approaches has implications for media literacy educators’ career options, scholarly identities, and teaching strategies. Specifically, I consider my own negotiation of increasing administrative and student demands for “hands-on” production courses by confessing both my advantages on the job market and my post-hire challenges in articulating a clear research agenda. I then conclude with a case study of how I repurposed my scholar-practitioner identity and used critical theory to drive production by bringing film students into a cultural studies …

Audience Response And From Film Adaptation To Reading Literature, Klaudia H.Y. Lee

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Audience Response and from Film Adaptation to Reading Literature" Klaudia H.Y. Lee analyses results from 3000-plus interview conducted across university campuses in Hong Kong in order to investigate the roles of screen adaptations and their intertextual relationship for developing students' critical textual practice. Lee combines reader-response theory (Iser and Rosenblatt) with empirical data to explore students' actual encounters and experience with texts. While the data suggests an influence of screen adaptations on students' choice and motivation of reading, this interest can potentially be developed into a critical awareness of the various intertextual possibilities that exist in different …

Bearers Of Diverse Ecclesiologies: Imagining Catholic School Students As Informing A Broader Articulation Of Catholic School Aims, Graham P. Mcdonough

Journal of Catholic Education

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive, although not exhaustive, picture of the kinds of real concerns and concurrently inferred ecclesiological perspectives practicing Catholic students have. It reports findings from an interview study with 16 students at a private Catholic high school in Canada who self-identify as Catholic in order to demonstrate that it is in a Catholic school’s best interest not to rely on narrow or singular definitions of Catholic identity, especially insofar as these are tied to minimal and external markers of institutional affiliation. While the sample’s size and particularity do not generalizing to a …

Beyond Behavior, Craig C. Laupheimer

Scholarship and Engagement in Education

Teaching to engage students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can inspire the whole classroom and make teaching and learning engaging and exciting. Although teachers and students alike face a challenging educational landscape, much can be done to empower students with special needs. Teaching with the whole classroom in mind with an emphasis on hands on, explorative and inspirational learning experiences to accommodate for these students strengthens and causes student engagement and agency. This article highlights the challenges and potential breakthroughs possible for classroom instruction specifically where the ADHD student is concerned and looks towards teaching mindfulness and empowerment as …

History Through Literature: The American Revolution In New York City 1775-1777, Brittany Lester

Graduate Student Independent Studies

History Through Literature is a homeschooling history curriculum for ages 10-12, or grades five and six, designed specifically with the needs of New York City's homeschooling community in mind. Using the historical novel Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson as a framework, the curriculum covers a variety of themes and topics within the context of the American Revolution in New York City from 1775 to 1777. Following a chronologically linear path through six learning units, the History Through Literature makes connections between true historical events and the fictional story of Anderson's heroine, Isabel, an enslaved girl determined to claim her freedom.

Creating The Capable Public: A Call For Liberal Arts Education In Public Schools, Olivia R. Keithley

Educational Studies Honors Papers

I argue that liberal arts education is critically important to the creation of a capable public in a democratic society. I draw on David Labaree and Henry Giroux to assert that education is a public good and must serve the purpose of promoting democratic equality. By promoting democratic equality, public education is capable of creating publicly minded citizens. Publicly minded citizens of a democracy must also be free-thinking. Liberal arts education has at its core the aim of creating individuals who are able to think freely and autonomously. In a democratic society where freethinking citizens are necessary in order to …

Bringing Curriculum Outdoors: Implementing Gardening Outdoors, Nicole Aboujaoude

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Traditional public schools are not always giving students access to opportunities to experience innovative approaches to learning like garden-based education. Garden-based education uses the garden in everyday curriculum as well as giving students the opportunity to experience hands-on learning. An outdoor garden can be a tool in promoting outdoor education and positive peer relationships. Through interviews with teachers from the garden program and surveys with students who participate in this program, this Capstone examines the benefits of taking the curriculum outdoors and implementing garden-based education. Students and teachers showed high remarks when taking the curriculum outside in the garden. Having …

Spectators Or Patriots? Citizens In The Information Age, Amrita Dhawan

Publications and Research

In theory, a strong democracy rests on robust citizen participation. The practice in most democracies is quite different. This gap presents a challenge, which can be narrowed by augmenting civic education to bring it up to date with the current information environment and thus give citizens the opportunity to participate. Robert Dahl’s work on democracy provides a model that looks at this problem structurally. He writes about the ideals and the actual institutions necessary for a democracy and if we situate his model in the modern information environment we get a better idea of how to improve civic education. Successful …

Course-Based Science Research Promotes Learning In Diverse Students At Diverse Institutions, Nancy L. Staub, Lawrence S. Blumer, Christopher W. Beck, Veronique A. Delesalle, Gerald D. Griffin, Robert B. Merritt, Bettye Sue Hennington, Wendy H. Grillo, Gail P. Hollowell, Sandra L. White, Catherine M. Mader

Biology Faculty Publications

Course-based research experiences (CREs) are powerful strategies for spreading learning and improving persistence for all students, both science majors and nonscience majors. Here we address the crucial components of CREs (context, discovery, ownership, iteration, communication, presentation) found across a broad range of such courses at a variety of academic institutions. We also address how the design of a CRE should vary according to the background of student participants; no single CRE format is perfect. We provide a framework for implementing CREs across multiple institutional types and several disciplines throughout the typical four years of undergraduate work, designed to a variety …

A Tradition Unlike Any Other: Research On The Value Of An Honors Senior Thesis, H. Kay Banks

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

If you are a fan of golf and, more specifically, the Masters Golf Tournament, then the title of this article should sound familiar. As an avid sports fan and an occasional golf player, when I hear those words I immediately think of green grass, Tiger Woods’s first green jacket, and the soft-spoken Dr. Condeleeza Rice as the newest member of the Augusta National Golf Club (home of the Masters for non-golf fans). The Masters is the first of four major U.S. golf tournaments played each year, a tradition going back to 1934. What makes this tournament quintessential to the sport …

Honors And Non-Honors Student Engagement: A Model Of Student, Curricular, And Institutional Characteristics, Ellen Buckner, Melanie Shores, Michael Sloane, John Dantzler, Catherine Shields, Karen Shader, Bradley Newcomer

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors administrators may ask whether honors experiences facilitate student growth and whether honors students are inherently smarter than non-honors students and hence more able to seize these opportunities for growth. Although these questions will never fully be answered, we designed the current study to address the underlying topics of student characteristics and engagement in honors within the larger university.

Students’ motivation, their willingness to extend beyond the minimal level, significantly influences engagement. Honors students are engaged in experiences, curricular and extracurricular, that promote development, and the types of additional opportunities available to honors students and the feedback they receive affect …

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 …

Research In, On, Or About Honors, Marygold Walsh-Dilley

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In his thought provoking essay in this issue, George Mariz makes a call for “devoting some serious attention to setting an agenda for honors research.” He tells us that research in honors is a lot less common than it would appear to a casual observer, writing that “Both narrative and statistical accounts of honors are so far inadequate to yield useful conclusions.” Honors administrators, he contends, need this sort of analysis in order to “be able to argue with hard evidence for the . . . demonstrable advantages of honors.” As a result of these concerns, he writes, “Research in …

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 …

Editor’S Introduction, Vol. 17, No. 1, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

During the sixteen years since JNCHC came into being, research in honors has steadily shifted its focus and approach. In the early days, essays represented a wide variety of disciplines and, in order to qualify as research, needed only to root themselves in previous literature on a topic. As honors, along with the culture in which it is practiced, moved into the era of accountability and assessment, “research in honors” has increasingly come to mean quantitative studies rooted in the formats, methods, and terminology of the social sciences. The purpose of research in honors has also shifted, more subtly, from …

An Examination Of Student Engagement And Retention In An Honors Program, Jessica A. Kampfe, Christine L. Chasek, John Falconer

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors programs at colleges and universities provide academic and developmental opportunities for high-ability students. Learning communities, defined as a group of students who live together, are connected through membership in a common organization, and take classes together, are often a component of honors programs. Learning communities provide an academic and social community that complements curricular requirements. At the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), a higher education institution in the Midwest, ninety percent of the freshman honor students live together and ninety-five percent take an honors class in their first semester on campus. The honors program at UNK is classified …

Blogging To Develop Honors Students’ Writing, Sarah Harlan-Haughey, Taylor Cunningham, Katherine Lees, Andrew Estrup

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

After an exciting class discussion, you might want students to write conventional papers directed at you and focused ultimately on a grade, or you might prefer that they bring their further insights to their classmates, continuing and enriching the ongoing class collaboration. Blogging is an excellent way to implement the second option, continuing an exchange of ideas and providing students with another tool to improve their writing skills. Student class blogging offers many benefits—for student and instructor alike—compared to assigning conventional papers directed only at the instructor. The collaborative writing and peer editing inherent in blogging offer challenges as well …

Research On Honors Composition, 2004–2015, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The spring/summer 2004 issue of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (JNCHC) was devoted exclusively to research in honors education. The issue was divided into three sections: the introductory Forum on Research in Honors, which revisited three essays published in Forum for Honors in 1984 and included two 2004 responses; Research in Honors; and Research about Honors. After I had revised my dissertation for the 2003 NCHC monograph Honors Composition: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practices, I incorporated some of my unused dissertation material for two pieces in the issue, one being a response essay in the Forum, …

How Gender Differences Shape Student Success In Honors, Susan E. Dinan

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In 2014, Jonathan Zimmerman published an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor in which he wrote, “The last time I checked, [men] held most of the important positions of power and influence in American society. And yet, college admissions offices lower the standard for young men—effectively raising it for women—simply to make sure that the men keep coming.” This comment was not surprising as, seven years earlier, the U.S. News & World Report had published “Many Colleges Reject Women at Higher Rates Than For Men,” in which Alex Kingsbury memorably asserted:

Using undergraduate admissions rate data collected from more than …

Demography Of Honors: The National Landscape Of Honors Education, Richard Ira Scott, Patricia J. Smith

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) celebrates its fiftieth year, the organization has an excellent opportunity to reflect on how honors education has spread during its history. Tracking growth in the number of institutions delivering honors education outside of its membership has not been a priority for NCHC or for researchers in honors education. Most information has been anecdotal, and when researchers have mounted surveys, the results are frequently non-comprehensive, based on convenience sampling. We propose a demography of honors to fill the lacuna with systemic, reliable information.

Demographic studies describe the size, structure, and distribution of human populations, …

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 …