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2013 Intersession Catalog, Illinois Mathematics And Science Academy

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Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Purchases may be made by calling (402) 472-9150, emailing [email protected], visiting our website , or mailing a check or money order payable to: NCHC • University of Nebraska–Lincoln • 1100 Neihardt Residence Center • 540 N. 16th Street • Lincoln, NE 68588-0627.

Admissions And Retention In Honors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The National Collegiate Honors Council is an association of faculty, students, and others interested in honors education. Executive Committee: Rick Scott, President, University of Central Arkansas; Jim Ruebel, President-Elect, Ball State University; Gregory Lanier, Immediate Past-President, University of West Florida; Barry Falk, Vice-President, James Madison University; Kyoko Amano, Secretary, University of Indianapolis; Gary Bell, Treasurer, Texas Tech University. Executive Director: Cynthia M. Hill, headquartered at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Board of Directors: Suketu Bhavsar, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Lisa Coleman, Southeastern Oklahoma State University; Riley Cook, University of Iowa; Emily Jones, Oklahoma State University; Joe King, Radford University; Jon Kotinek, …

Assessing Rigor In Experiential Education: A Working Model From Partners In The Parks, John S. Maclean, Brian J. White

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Assessment has become a popular buzzword on academic campuses over the last few decades. Most assessment models are designed to evaluate traditional learning structures. If we were to state simply the process of assessment, it might read like this: a) what you want the students to learn; b) how you want to teach the material; c) how you know if the students learned the material. In a traditional pedagogical environment, for example, an instructor might want the students to learn how early geologists deduced the influence of glaciation in the Sierra Mountains from striations on polished granite surfaces. She would …

They Come But Do They Finish? Program Completion For Honors Students At A Major Public University, 1998–2010, Lynne Goodstein, Patricia Szarek

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In recent years the option of enrolling in honors programs and colleges at major public universities has increasingly become an alternative to elite private and public institutions for some of the brightest and most academically talented high school graduates. To attract these high-achieving students, universities may offer applicants incentives such as merit scholarships, smaller classes, honors residential options, research experiences, and enrichment programs. The message to prospective students is that, by enrolling in an honors college or program, they will receive an education that rivals what would be obtained at an elite private school and at a much lower price. …

Dedication

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Recently selected as an NCHC Fellow, Hallie Savage has been a major player in honors for the past sixteen years. Having earned her PhD from Kent State University, she joined the faculty of Clarion University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and is Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders as well as, since 1997, Director of the Honors Program. During her years at Clarion, she has produced many pages’ worth of publications and presentations in honors as well as in her academic discipline while also receiving numerous awards for her teaching and service. Her service to the National Collegiate Honors Council began …

Notes Toward An Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy, Jerry Herron

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

I beg indulgence for an opening anecdote that will perhaps point the issue at hand in a useful direction. I am descended from an honorable line of traveling preachers and car salesmen. As to the preachers, one forebear in particular would occasionally suffer a certain reluctance among the flock when he made his call inviting potential congregants to come forward and receive the benefits of faith, which—to invoke the other side of my family tree—was not unlike the annual call to view new car models back when model change was real and something people could believe in. In order to …

Propensity Score Analysis Of An Honors Program’S Contribution To Students’ Retention And Graduation Outcomes, Robert R. Keller, Michael G. Lacy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors directors and deans know or presume that retention and graduation rates of honors students substantially exceed those of non-honors students. In our research, we have attempted to better determine what portion of this success is attributable to the academic and other benefits of honors programs as opposed to the background characteristics of the students. Among the former, we would point to innovative and small classes, more individual attention for honors students from faculty and staff, residential learning communities, thesis experiences, and extra-curricular opportunities, all of which might be expected to make the college experience more engaging for honors students …

Meeting The Aims Of Honors In The Online Environment, Melissa L. Johson

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In 1998, the Boyer Commission called for using more innovative methods of course delivery, moving away from the traditional lecture toward inquiry-based learning. The National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) has long held that undergraduate honors education is one arena where pedagogical innovation takes place. Members of the honors community note that what makes honors unique is that honors courses serve as laboratories of curricular innovation and experiential learning (Braid, “Cultivating”; Braid, “Majoring; Bruce; Hutgett; Lacey; Schuman, “Cultivating”; Strikwerda; Werth; Wolfensberger, van Eijl, & Pilot). Exemplary honors courses should include participatory learning, an emphasis on primary sources, interdisciplinary and experiential themes, …

Editor’S Introduction, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

This issue of the Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council begins with a Forum on “Nontraditional Honors Students.” We distributed the lead essay titled “Nontraditional Honors,” by Janice Rye Kinghorn of Miami University Middletown and Whitney Womack Smith of Miami University Hamilton, on the NCHC website, on the listserv, and in NCHC e-Newletters several months in advance, and we invited contributors to consider the following questions:

Admissions, Retention, And Reframing The Question “Isn’T It Just More Work?”, Michael K. Cundall Jr.

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the lead essay of this Forum, one of the questions Jerry Herron asks in discussing honors admissions is “What are we offering?” This question relates directly to the question often posed by well-meaning parents, wellintentioned students, and inquisitive administrators who want to know if honors is just more and/or harder work and hence not worth the risk. Having gotten a B in honors calculus will do damage to a GPA when the student could have earned an A in a non-honors calculus course. Students and parents might thus perceive the cost of honors work to outweigh the possible benefits, …

Editor’S Introduction 2, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

At least as much as the curricular or extracurricular opportunities that an honors program offers to students, its admissions and retention policies determine the teaching and learning that take place within it. In defining which students will be welcome in the community of honors, administrators broadcast their values before students even apply. If grades and test scores are the criteria for admission, then students can anticipate that the program will hold such competitive rankings in high regard. The higher the required grades and scores, the more rigorous the competition that students can expect. Students should also anticipate that retention policies …

Assessing Success In Honors: Getting Beyond Graduation Rates, Sean K. Kelly

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

An honors curriculum with realistic graduation requirements should have a respectable graduation rate. This number, when low, can indicate significant problems in the program. But a high graduation rate does not necessarily indicate success. A quality honors program, especially one that remains attentive to students’ ability to thrive, might have better measures available for judging impact and effectiveness. After all, manipulating a graduation rate is easy: make the curriculum excessively convenient and lower standards. While some honors curricula are perhaps unnecessarily rigid or unusually difficult, the faculty and administrators of most quality programs have managed to create a curriculum with …

Factors Influencing Honors College Recruitment, Persistence, And Satisfaction At An Upper-Midwest Land Grant University, Timothy J. Nichols, Kuo-Liang Matt Chang

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Student success and the “completion agenda” are important issues in higher education today (Complete College America). For honors programs and colleges, understanding and advancing these issues requires data-driven approaches tailored to the unique honors student population and broader institutional contexts. Honors faculty and administrators hoping to succeed in their recruitment, retention, and graduation efforts need an accurate understanding of why students decide to enroll and persist as well as their satisfaction with honors experiences. Our research data provide particular insight into the student experience at South Dakota State University (SDSU) but may also be instructive to a broader audience of …

About The Authors 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Scott Carnicom is a professor of psychology and an associate dean of the honors college at Middle Tennessee State University. Since 2012, he has also served as a special assistant in the provost’s office helping with a variety of initiatives. In 2011–12, he served as an ACE Fellow at Kenyon College.

Contents

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dedication to Hallie Ellis …

Predicting Student Success, Ameliorating Risk, And Guarding Against Homogeneity In Honors, Scott Carnicom

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Jerry Herron’s thought-provoking essay raised three key issues in my mind that I hope to describe in this humble response to his fine work. The overarching theme of his essay was to inquire how honors administrators predict student success and how they use that predictive power wisely and objectively to admit students and maintain quality. I want to expand on this idea and point out that such algorithms ideally could also predict students at risk so that institutional personnel could mobilize support efforts more proactively. Additionally, Herron notes the honors community’s appropriate and unyielding focus on academic quality at a …

Improving Retention And Fit By Honing An Honors Admissions Model, Patricia Joanne Smith, John Thomas Vitus Zagurski

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

For over a century, admissions officers and enrollment managers have relied on external validation of merit in selective admission of undergraduates. A main criterion used for selection is standardized testing, i.e., the SAT and ACT. Since these tests have been long-suspected and then shown to contain class and race biases while not accurately predicting retention (Banerji), the Schedler Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) shifted to a holistic, multi-criterion selection process, de-emphasizing standardized tests, and then analyzed the outcomes. The statistical analysis served two goals. The first was to test whether variables in the admissions model, developed …

Signifying Difference: The Nontraditional Student And The Honors Program, Nancy Reichert

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In their essay “Nontraditional Honors,” Janice Rye Kinghorn and Whitney Womack Smith state that students who are “twenty-five-years of age and older are usually considered nontraditional.” However, they first acknowledge that “traditional” and “nontraditional” are “constructed and slippery terms.” One of the most important ways that we as faculty and staff can serve our students through an honors education is to deconstruct terms such as “traditional” and “nontraditional” in order to show the significant gaps between the signifiers and the signified and to expose the negative connotations of a construct that is defined as not being the other construct.

John Boswell: Posting Historical Landmarks At The Leading Edge Of The Culture Wars, Jeffery Cisneros

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One of the most enduring and controversial figures in the field of history is John E. Boswell. His work on homosexuality and the history of the Christian Church was published at a key time during the Stonewall Riots in the late 1960s and the removal of homosexuality from the list of diagnostic mental disorders in the mid 1970s. This social upheaval created a dynamic that not only influenced Boswell personally but contributed to the vehement reaction to his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. …