Educational Administration and Supervision Commons^™

Curriculum Gone Bad: The Case Against Honors Contracts, Richard Badenhausen

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This volume offers a timely and much-needed discussion, for in spite of their apparent ubiquity across the honors landscape, contracts are not a feature of honors education that has received much attention. For example, the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (NCHC) “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program” and its companion statement on honors colleges—documents meant to guide colleges and universities in curricular innovation, engaged pedagogy, and intentional learning—make no mention of contracts. Additionally, NCHC’s 2016 Census of U.S. Honors Programs and Colleges, which captured qualities of 408 responding member institutions, asked over a dozen questions about curricular features of …

Enhancing The Structure And Impact Of Honors By Contract Projects With Templates And Research Hubs, James G. Snyder, Melinda Weisberg

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The Honors by Contract (HBC) option is by its nature underdefined. That is to say, there are likely as many versions of the HBC as there are honors programs or colleges that use them. Some HBCs are attached to non-honors courses to augment the course content, whereas others are stand-alone mentored replacements for honors seminars themselves, following more of an independent study model. Some programs use HBCs to initiate students into the nature and scope of undergraduate research, and the deliverables vary widely. Likewise, the challenges and difficulties surrounding HBCs change from institution to institution. Because it appears natural to …

Building Honors Contracts: Insights And Oversights, Introduction, Kristine Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This book asks an overdue question: can we build honors contracts that transcend the transactional? The word “contract” itself—as both noun and verb—delimits more possibilities than it reveals. The chapters collected here expand this restrictive term by reframing honors contracts as collaborative partnerships for experiential learning. While most, though not all, of the volume’s contributors accept standard definitions of honors contracts as “[e]nriched options within regular [non-honors] courses,” they also imagine many and varied possibilities for such enrichment (Schuman 33). The subtitle’s pairing of “Insights” and “Oversights” thus suggests not that the authors have seen it all or missed the …

Honors Abroad Through Third-Party Providers, Susan E. Dinan

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Given the challenges of promoting internationalization by expanding our institutions’ international student populations (Fischer), the development of our students as global citizens through study abroad and curriculum offerings appears more important than ever. Providing innovative and challenging curriculum options that align with the long-espoused pedagogical approaches of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC)— many of which foreshadowed today’s highly touted high-impact practices such as undergraduate research, strong faculty-student mentor relationships, and study abroad—constitutes a desirable path to pursue (NCHC Board; Kuh). Yet, admittedly these valuable practices come with a price for institutions and students. For example, the increasingly popular summer …

Early Impact: Assessing Global-Mindedness And Intercultural Competence In A First-Year Honors Abroad Course, Michael Carignan, Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Within the expanding field of study abroad scholarship, recent research on honors-based programming indicates an evolving understanding of how the goals of most study abroad programs align with those of honors programs (Camarena and Collins; Frost et al.; Markus et al.). The tradition of incorporating international experiences into honors education is longstanding, and recent descriptions of related programming highlight the diversity of disciplines, locations, aims, and pedagogies across institutions (Mulvaney and Klein ix–x). One common thread, however, is a desire to facilitate not only academic but also intercultural competencies in order to prepare honors students for an increasingly interconnected world. …

2019-2020 - Undergraduate Curriculum Council Annual Report, Undergraduate Curriculum Council, East Tennessee State University

Undergraduate Curriculum Council Minutes

No abstract provided.

The Long-Term Impact Of Study Abroad On Honors Program Alumni, Mary Kay Mulvaney

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Note: An earlier version of this chapter was published in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad (vol. 29, no. 1, 2017, pp. 46–67). This essay appears with permission of that journal and in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution License Agreement. This reprint includes an Afterword that briefly explains three international education initiatives that evolved from the original findings of this study.

“Study abroad enables students to experience an interconnected world and to embrace difference rather than being threatened by it; it shows them the collective heritage of mankind” (Wolfensberger 281). Indeed, study abroad is often thought to be …

Exploring Community College Stigma: A Phenomenology Of The Lived Experience For Community College Transfer Students Attending The University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Eric M. Michael

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Despite impressive statistics related to community college transfer student achievement, negative perceptions and stigma attached to attending community college persist. The problem addressed by this phenomenological study is the community college stigma experience for transfer students attending the most highly-ranked public university in Massachusetts: UMass Amherst. This dissertation pioneers use of a conceptual framework built from the elements of stereotype threat to illustrate experienced community college stigma; Specifically, it begins to address the forty-year-old unsubstantiated contention of William Neumann and David Riesman, that there is less stigma attached to attending community college in California than in Massachusetts. Broken down to …

Women Leaders In Mathematics Education: An Analysis Of Gender In Leadership Roles In Professional Organizations, Brianna Kurtz, Farshid Safi

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

Professional organizations within mathematics education have been a source of development, connection, pedagogical direction, and policy for decades. With gender and equity discussions reaching the forefront of the mathematics education conversation, one must consider the gender representation of those leading the organizations upon which we rely. The authors analyzed historical presidential data from four major mathematics education professional organizations in the United States. Women were found to be in presidential roles at a statistically significantly less proportion (p<0.001) in three of the four organizations. When the organizations were considered aggregately since the enactment of Title IX, a trend to a plateau at 40% female leadership was seen. Future analysis beyond the presidential role and breakdowns by other factors are advisable.

Improving Practice In Special Education: The Evaluation Process As A Development Tool, Allison Gilmour, Amanda Sheaffer, Caitlyn E. Majeika

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

Throughout the country, schools are using new teacher evaluation systems as a tool for professional development with the goal of improving teaching quality and students’ outcomes. However, not all teacher evaluation rubrics specifically address or encourage evidence-based practices for special education teachers, and many principals report that they are unsure how to evaluate special education teachers. This article provides an overview of teacher evaluation and special education teacher evaluation, and presents a strategy, based on existing research on effective teacher coaching and performance feedback, goal setting, and self-monitoring, to assist special educators in leveraging the evaluation process as a professional …

The Quest To Increase Student Academic Outcomes: Actions Of Two Charter High Schools, Laura Schaffer Metcalfe

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

This study examined how two charter high schools located in the Phoenix area with a large population of low-socioeconomic students were able to assist students with academic success as measured through accomplishment on standardized achievement tests. Analysis of two Title 1 Reward high schools with grades 9 – 12 during the 2014 school year to determine what actions were implemented to attain high levels of student success on standardized achievement tests. Results were gathered through qualitative means from teacher, administrator, and other staff interviews and classroom observations. Findings from the study revealed how students were successful on standardized tests, how …

Understanding How Edd Students View Educational Research: A Qualitative Study Using Domain, Taxonomic, Componential And Text Mining Analysis, Chen Zong, Courtney Donovan, Dara Marin Prais

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore how EdD students initially view educational research and themselves as researchers before taking their first required research course. This study used four types of qualitative data analysis methods: domain, taxonomic, componential, and text mining. The findings suggest that the EdD students are able to identity several attributes of research, but there is a dissonance on the attributes aligned with upper academic research. The students understand the importance of research to educational practices, but do not have sufficient understanding about research methods and methodologies. Their views of what research is are formal …

An Analysis Of Central Florida Principals' Professional Perceptions Relative To Safe-School Officers In One Large Urban School District, Christina Steppi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Public school districts in Florida are required by law to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies to establish and assign one or more safe-school officers at each public school. Public school principals assume a significant role in the implementation of state policy measures and are responsible for providing safe school climates for students and staff (Coburn, 2005; Gawlik, 2015). However, principals' perceptions inform their individual interpretation of state policy measures, influencing the implementation process (Reid, 2017). This study utilized a cross-sectional survey to measure principals' perceptions of safe-school officers and their effect on facilitating safe school climates for students in …

Rural School District Principals’ Perceptions For Recruiting, Hiring, And Retaining Highly Qualified Teachers, Mary Giles

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Highly qualified teachers (HQTs) have more influence on students’ academic success than class size, curriculum, school culture, and technology. However, principals display discrepant practices in recruiting, hiring, and retaining HQTs. The purpose of this basic exploratory qualitative study was to investigate the perceptions of elementary, middle, and high school principals from a rural school district in a southern state concerning practices of recruiting, hiring, and retaining HQTs. Senge’s paradigm of a learning organization and an adapted model of Dickinson’s recruitment, selection, and retention of child welfare workers guided this study. Research questions addressed administrators’ perceptions of strategies used to recruit, …

High School Principals' Instructional Leadership Practices To Reduce School Violence, Linda Hunt

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

With the constant increase of school violence, there is a need to prepare leaders how to best protect the school. However, high school principals may be inconsistently implementing instructional leadership practices that have been shown to reduce school violence. The purpose of this basic qualitative research design was to examine how high school principals were implementing instructional leadership practices to reduce school violence. The conceptual framework was Bandura's social learning theory, which posits that people can learn by observing the behavior of others, and Hallinger's and Murphy's theory of instructional leadership regarding andragogy. A purposive sampling was used to select …

A Supplemental Leadership Development Programs Model Preparing Aspiring Leaders For Principalship, Kathleen M. Setzer

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A suburban school district in the Mid-Atlantic faces a crisis with a lack of qualified principals to lead middle schools and high schools. The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain an understanding of the perceptions of principals who participated in the Associate Principal Leadership Development Program in a suburban public school district in the Mid-Atlantic. The conceptual framework of this study was grounded in Senge's systems thinking, which looks at the components of a system and the system as a whole to determine how the interconnectedness of the components impacts the entire system. Schools have intricate components, such …

Exploring The Experiences Of First Generation College Students, Maceo Daniel Wattley

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

At a large, urban university in the Midwestern United States, graduation rates of first-generation college students (FGCS) who are the first within a family to be admitted and attend a 4-year post-secondary institution of higher learning have declined over the past decade despite programs instituted to improve student retention. The purpose of the study was to explore FGCS’s and university administrators’ experiences affecting the decisions for FGCS to drop out and to examine student and administrator recommendations for improvements, based on their experiences, to prevent attrition. Guided by Knowles’s theory of andragogy, which describes how adult learners are self-directed and …

It’S A Family Affair: Exploring The Needs Of Families In Supporting Trio Upward Bound Students, Tashena Denise Briggs

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

First-generation and/or low-income families have a difficult time navigating the college-going process. These families have daily obstacles that make preparing and entering post-secondary education challenging, including family trauma, financial hardships, decision-making skills, and lack of knowledge regarding college-going strategies. The purpose of this study is to uncover what specific support tools low-income and/or first-generation families participating in the Danielsville College TRIO Upward Bound program need as they support their students through the college-going process at Hinley Park High School. This qualitative study utilized a research methodology case study approach to understand the lived experiences of fifteen participants (one student, three …

Georgia’S Senior Citizen Tuition Waiver Program: Current Status, Web Presence, And Web Content, Donald L. Ariail, W. Ken Harmon, David Nwokocha

Georgia Educational Researcher

Senior citizens are becoming a larger and more significant part of the workforce as they desire to work longer. Companies have found these individuals bring valuable skills to the workplace; however, they frequently need to update those skills or pursue new degrees. Since 1976, Georgia has had a law granting senior citizens tuition waivers in the state’s public higher education institutions, thus allowing them the ability to take courses to update their skills. This study assessed the current status of the tuition waiver program by reviewing web sites of the 26 institutions in the University System of Georgia to determine …

Principal Instructional Leadership For Teacher Participation In Professional Development: Evidence From Japan, Singapore, And South Korea, Taeyeon Kim, Youngjun Lee

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

We investigated the relationship between principal instructional leadership and teacher participation in multiple types of professional development in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Using the Teaching and Learning International Survey dataset of 2013, we employed two-level logistic regression models to estimate the rigorous effects of principal instructional leadership that were separated out from teacher-level effects. We found that the influence of principal instructional leadership on teachers’ participation in professional development varied across types of learning activities and countries. Our analysis suggests that principal instructional leadership can influence teachers’ participation in mentoring, mentoring, peer observation, and coaching compared to the other …

Expectations And Incentives: Parental Financial Support For College During The Transition To Young Adulthood, Allyson Flaster

Journal of Student Financial Aid

This study provides new insight into enrollment disparities by examining how the financial support adolescents expect to receive from parents as they transition to young adulthood differs by parent and family characteristics and whether they attend college. I do this by estimating expectations of cash and in-kind co-residency support in the year after high school completion using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The results indicate that children whose parents are highly educated, who have high solidarity with their parents, and whose parents hold norms of adolescent financial dependency have particularly large financial incentives to attend college—particularly a …

Clicking In The Dark: Are Student Financial Aid Websites Accessible For Students With Disabilities?, Zachary W. Taylor

Journal of Student Financial Aid

The United States (U.S.) Access Board, a branch of the federal government responsible for advancing the inclusion of people with disabilities into U.S. society, recently amended Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). On January 18th, 2018, the final Section 508 amendment required all Title IV institutions of higher education in the United States to conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) at the Level-A and Level-AA thresholds. As students with disabilities are often minoritized from the U.S. higher education system, this study explored the web accessibility of institutional .edu financial aid websites (n=450) to learn if …

Honors Contracts: Empowering Students And Fostering Autonomy In Honors Education, Anne Dotter

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Although culturally mandated as a gateway to professional opportunities and wealth, college degrees are the prerogative of only half of the United States population, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (Musu-Gilette et al. v). Even those who attend college do not always acquire the training they need to achieve their goals: the lack of written communication or analytical skills directly impacts retention and completion, particularly of students underprepared for college. The National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) website features a “Diversity and Inclusion Statement” under its “Definition of Honors Education,” and the organization has placed equity and inclusion at …

One Hand Washes The Other: Designing Mutually Beneficial Honors Contracts, Antonina Bambina

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At their best, honors contracts can be creative, challenging, exceptional learning opportunities for students and faculty. At their worst, they promote busywork that fails to deliver enhanced educational experiences. While I am proud of the many contracts that allowed honors students at my former institution, the University of Southern Indiana, to collaborate on customized learning and deeper relationships with course material and faculty, I also found myself on occasion having to apologize to students or faculty for the stunted, lackluster projects that one party or the other proposed. These conflicting sentiments illustrate why Richard Badenhausen urges the honors community to …

An Undeserved Reputation: How Contract Courses Can Work For A Small Honors Program, Jon Hageman

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In the first chapter of this volume, Richard Badenhausen argues that contract courses have often suffered from ambiguous or homogenous expectations, compromising honors pedagogy and learning. Anecdotally, not many positive attributes have been ascribed to contract courses in the honors community. Contracts often require more work than courses to establish and administer to completion. Given the shortcomings and the amount of work required to implement contract courses successfully, why are they used at all? I argue that, in some cases, contract courses—or non-honors courses that move beyond regular course requirements with agreed-upon independent study work mentored by the professor—are the …

Honors Contracts: A Scaffolding To Independent Inquiry, Cindy S. Ticknor, Shamim Khan

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Honors contracts can be valuable curricular assets if aligned with institutional goals and properly supported to overcome the challenges they sometimes present. At Columbus State University (CSU), honors contracts allow students to achieve one of our primary learning outcomes: honors graduates will demonstrate the ability to design independent inquiry projects that require critical and creative thinking. We believe graduate schools value this ability, and we know that employers in our community seek honors graduates who can work independently on extended projects, communicate effectively, and solve problems analytically and creatively. We achieve this important learning outcome by requiring a senior project …

A High-Impact Strategy For Honors Contract Courses, Gary Wyatt

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

This essay describes a strategy implemented at Emporia State University for offering high-impact honors contract courses in a collaborative environment. After considering the role of honors contract courses in our college, the chapter demonstrates the importance of guiding students and instructors in creating contract applications and shaping requirements to ensure that contract courses are true honors experiences. Our contract applications demand a collaborative effort in which students and instructors demonstrate together how core requirements will be satisfied. Each application is unique and generally involves the development of a mentoring relationship. The chapter includes examples illustrating some key value-added outcomes students …

Ensuring A Quality Honors Experience Through Learning Contracts: Success Beyond Our Wildest Dreams, Julia A. Haseleu, Laurie A. Taylor

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In 1997, when Julia A. Haseleu started teaching at Kirkwood Community College (KCC) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, her charge as a psychology instructor with honors experience was to develop an honors program based on learning contracts. Other faculty and administrators had attempted to offer honors courses at KCC, but these efforts had failed. Rhonda Kekke, KCC Dean of Arts and Humanities, determined that the problem was the honors course format. At small to medium-sized colleges and universities, especially two-year campuses, finding a group of honors students who are interested in the same subjects, able to work the same courses into …

Facilitating Feedback: The Benefits Of Automation In Monitoring Completion Of Honors Contracts, Erin E. Edgington

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As we have seen in this volume so far, contract courses are an increasingly valuable pedagogical strategy for maintaining access to and demand for honors education. Administered with the “[i]ntentionality, transparency, [and] consistency” that Richard Badenhausen proposes in his opening essay (17), they can even, as Margaret Walsh suggests, help “shift [students’] focus from getting out of course requirements to getting into new and different courses to advance their capacity to learn” (40). While good reasons to offer contracts clearly exist, administering them nevertheless presents challenges. This essay considers process and pedagogy, with the aim of empowering both students and …

Honors In Practice: Beyond The Classroom, Kristine Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Six years ago, in my first week as director of the Utah State University (USU) Honors Program, a senior physics major and her frustrated faculty mentor marched into my office. The student was shy and embarrassed, the mentor surly and blunt: “Why,” he asked, “must a senior complete an honors contract in a class that isn’t fundamentally shaping her future?” Good question. Because students were required to earn honors credits each term at USU, the choice facing this student was whether to enroll in an honors general education course she did not need or to develop a contract to deepen …