Higher Education Administration Commons^™

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 …

Honors Teachers And Academic Identity: What To Look For When Recruiting Honors Faculty, Rocky Dailey

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The word “honors” naturally carries distinction. To be a collegiate honors student implies a higher level of academic achievement than other students as well as the more challenging academic experience that comes with smaller class sizes. Collegiate honors teachers have a distinction of their own. Being an honors teacher implies a high level of teaching achievement, and it requires special traits that honors directors need to look for in recruiting faculty. Guidance in determining what traits best characterize excellence in honors teaching is a useful tool for honors administrators who are trying to create an identity for their honors faculty.

“Flee From The Worship Of Idols”: Becoming Christian In Roman Corinth, Dorvan Byler

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The religious contexts in which early Christian communities grew were important factors in the first-century development of Christianity, affecting what it meant to become a Christian either as a convert from a background in Judaism or as a convert from a background in Greek, Roman, or Egyptian cults. Surrounding religions and cultural norms strongly influenced the first Christian communities in urban environments throughout the Roman Empire because the first generation of Christian converts came directly from other religious constructs. As the early Christians distinguished themselves from the Diaspora Jewish communities in which they originated and actively pursued Gentile converts, the …

The Honors College Experience Reconsidered: Exploring The Student Perspective, James H. Young Iii, Lachel Story, Samantha Tarver, Ellen Weinauer, Julia Keeler, Allison Mcquirter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Often administrators overlook the student voice in developing strategic plans, mission and vision statements, marketing strategies, student services, and extracurricular programming. Engaging students in these areas may enhance students’ cooperation, interactions, responsibility, and expectations. In order to assess honors students’ perspectives and experiences, the present study, rooted in a phenomenological approach, conducted three focus groups of traditional honors students, senior honors students, and honors college ambassadors. Students described their honors experience in three contexts: connectedness, community, and opportunity. This study informed a new vision and a new set of goals for the University of Southern Mississippi Honors College, and it …

Ap: Not A Replacement For Challenging College Coursework, Margaret Walsh

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

College affordability is weighing heavily this year on the minds of students, parents, faculty, and the U.S. electorate. Intent on saving money on college tuition as well as impressing college admissions committees, high-achieving students frequently start college-level work early through Advanced Placement courses. However, these courses do not replace the learning that takes place in college-level honors courses. For honors students, making the transition between high school and college means finding opportunities to learn in new ways, taking risks, and diving deeper into ideas.

For more than fifteen years I have been a professor of sociology at a public liberal …

The Effect Of Honors Courses On Grade Point Averages, Art L. Spisak, Suzanne Carter Squires

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

High-ability entering college students give three main reasons for not choosing to become part of honors programs and colleges; they and/or their parents believe that honors classes at the university level require more work than non-honors courses, are more stressful, and will adversely affect their self-image and grade point average (GPA) (Hill; Lacey; Rinn). Some of them are likely basing their belief on the experience they had with Advanced Placement (AP) classes in their high schools. Although AP classes are not specifically designed to be more work or more difficult, at their worst they can be little more than that …

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 …

Editor’S Introduction, Vol. 17, No. 2, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors students have long entered college with Advanced Placement credits already on their transcript, but in recent years the number of these credits has increased dramatically. At the same time, the more recent phenomenon of dual enrollment credits has ballooned. In a recent article called “As Dual Enrollments Swell, So Do Worries about Rigor,” Katherine Mangan writes, “Fueled by desires to cut college costs and improve access to underserved students, enrollment in dual-credit classes has been growing at a clip of about 7 percent a year nationally” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 Aug. 2016, A8). While the …

Reading Place, Reading Landscape: A Consideration Of City As TextTm And Geography, Ellen Hostetter

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The fundamental concepts employed by City as Text^TM (CAT)—the established experiential learning practice in honors education—and the discipline of geography, specifically the landscape tradition within human geography, share much in common. The overlaps offer CAT practitioners additional intellectual support from a source outside of honors while the differences suggest opportunities for incorporating new material into CAT programs. While CAT and the landscape tradition share the general concepts of professional orientations grounded in place, of close attention to place, and of place as a text to be read, the landscape tradition offers specific terminology to support and build on these …

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 …

Using Hybrid Courses To Enhance Honors Offerings In The Disciplines, Karen D. Youmans

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

How honors faculty and administrators might best respond to the challenge of AP/IP/dual enrollment credit mandates across the country will depend largely on the nature of their institutions and the size, structure, and mission of their individual programs. While the debate will continue about long-term consequences for the quality of higher education, the realities of the mandates have begun to force new and creative thinking about curriculum design in honors programs that could lead to positive developments for both students and faculty. In response to the demand to develop honors course offerings beyond the general education curriculum, the honors program …

Honors Thesis Preparation: Evidence Of The Benefits Of Structured Curricula, Steven Engel

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

A recent study of honors curricula across the nation indicates that 75.6% of honors programs and colleges at four-year institutions have thesis or capstone requirements (Savage and Cognard-Black). In addition to institutions with thesis requirements, many more also have the option for students to complete theses. For example, an earlier study found that 94.3% of honors colleges offered the opportunity to complete an honors thesis (Sederberg). As Anderson, Lyons, and Weiner indicate, the origins of the honors movement in the United States included an emphasis on the completion of an honors thesis. While discipline-based modes of research and creative scholarship …

A Digital Literacy Initiative In Honors: Perceptions Of Students And Instructors About Its Impact On Learning And Pedagogy, Jacob Alan English

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Researchers acknowledge the necessity of acquiring digital competencies to participate adequately in society (Ala-Mutka; Boyles; Cobo; Davies; Littlejohn, Beetham, & McGill; Teske & Etheridge; Tryon; Warf). Although the development of digital competencies has become increasingly important in higher education, integrating digital literacies in the college classroom has occurred at a slow pace. Honors programs and colleges represent one area of the academy that typically values a more traditional approach to skill development while resisting technology. My research study describes a digital literacy initiative in the Georgia State University Honors College, a large urban research university, and explores its perceived impact …

The Icss And The Development Of Black Collegiate Honors Education In The U.S., Traci L. M. Dula

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Precursor to the NCHC, the Inter-University Committee on the Superior Student (ICSS) was active from 1957 to 1965 under the leadership of Joseph Cohen at the University of Colorado. As NCHC culminates fifty years of supporting collegiate honors education, its historical context needs to include the contributions to honors from a unique group of institutions, the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). While scholars of collegiate honors education understand Frank Aydelotte, Swarthmore’s seventh president, to have started “a trend in honors among American colleges and universities” (Rinn 70), the honors literature does not provide evidence of Aydelotte’s engagement with …

Rethinking Honors Curriculum In Light Of The Ap/Ib/Dual Enrollment Challenge: Innovation And Curricular Flexibility, David Coleman, Katie Patton

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Annmarie Guzy’s lead article for this volume speaks of a familiar challenge in the Eastern Kentucky University Honors Program. The nearly universal and dramatic increase in the number of AP, IB, and/or Dual Enrollment credit hours among our incoming first-year honors students over the past two decades served as the primary impetus for a major curricular overhaul within our program in 2013. The result—what we call our new (post-2013) “Honors Flex” curriculum—was initially a source of considerable anxiety among many of our faculty as well as some of our students and alumni. In retrospect, however, we are able to see …

A Dual Perspective On Ap, Dual Enrollment, And Honors, Heather C. Camp, Giovanna E. Walters

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

As co-authors of this response to Annmarie Guzy’s essay, we provide different vantage points on prior-credit programs that arise from our distinct roles on campus, and together we suggest the appropriate way forward for honors. To represent our unique perspectives and to mimic the ongoing back-and-forth on this topic on our campus and elsewhere, we have chosen to format our response as a dialogue, thus suggesting some of the multiple voices and angles on AP, dual enrollment, and honors.

Both of us have felt the impact of AP and dual enrollment programs and have worried about its implications for both …

Ap, Dual Enrollment, And The Survival Of Honors Education, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

At the NCHC annual conferences, in publications, and on the discussion list, honors educators frequently compare admissions criteria for individual programs and colleges, including minimum ACT and SAT scores, high school coursework and GPAs, and AP and IB credits and scores. In light of the seismic issues NCHC has faced over the past two decades—significant restructuring of governance, establishment of a central office, the accreditation debate—matters of admissions criteria and freshmen with incoming credits seem mundane, but a new admissions crisis has begun to emerge in the honors community. In an increasing number of states, legislatures are mandating uniform minimum …

Got Ap?, Joan Digby

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One of the first questions I ask prospective students is whether they have taken any AP or college courses in high school. The question itself frequently generates lines of tension in a student’s face while parents erupt into proud smiles. The difference can generally tell me whose idea it was to take AP or college courses and to what degree they considered them a benefit in gaining college admission and scholarship funding.

Families, especially those considering sending their children to a private four-year university, need all the help they can get in funding college. At my institution, four years without …

Writing Center Editor Strategies For Addressing Student Academic Entitlement In Intervention Editing, Sarah Ann Matthey

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Not all students who enroll in postsecondary institutions have the skills needed to be successful in higher education in reading and writing. At a for-profit, online university in Minnesota, many students were not completing 4 weeks of a remedial writing program, Intervention Editing (IE). According to internal surveys and personal communications, students' struggles to complete IE were partly due to academic entitlement (AE). AE is defined as students placing the responsibility for their academic success on third parties rather than on themselves. Using the theory of self-efficacy as a framework, the purpose of this intrinsic case study was to determine …

Teaching Through The Lens Of Humane Education In U.S. Schools, Kristine Cecilia Tucker

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Humane education (HE) is a specialized niche in higher education and adult learning. HE provides a curricular framework positioning environmental ethics, animal protection, human rights, media literacy, culture, and change processes as the nexus for understanding and inspiring social change. Research-derived experiences illuminating how educators conceptualize and implement HE in U.S. schools are absent from the scholarly literature. Facing this gap, practitioners and administrators of HE programs cannot access nor apply research-derived practices to inform instruction. To address this gap, a conceptual framework was advanced weaving together HE teaching experience, Freirean philosophy, hyphenated selves, reflection-in-action, transformative learning, and transformative education …

Using Spiral Dynamic Theory For Adult Civic Engagement Research And Social Justice Education, Lisa R. Brown

Adult Education Research Conference

Empirical civic engagement research based in a South American context. Participants included adult learner populations engaged in revolutionary protests that opposed private for-profit education in Chile. Findings were higher order Spiral Dynamic Theory thinking at the for-profits and lower civic engagement.

Patterns Of One-Course Cohort Participation In Online Teacher Education Programs, Janeal Crane Smith

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Online higher education is a field that can benefit significantly from further research on innovative pedagogical methods designed to support students and decrease attrition rates. One method shown to improve engagement and retention of students in online environments is to include interactive engagement. This case study explored the patterns of students' interactions and assessment performance in an introductory teacher education one-course cohort. The study used a conceptual framework incorporating Bandura's social learning theory and Siemens' theory of connectivism. The study assessed archival data, from Adobe Connect recordings and records of competency pass rates, on the interactions and patterns of behavior …

Returning From Abroad: A Comparative Review, Denver W. Miller

Capstone Collection

Reintegration into the once-familiar community after a sojourn abroad poses unique challenges to the undergraduate population and more could be done to help returnees process their experience. Seven institutions of varying size were surveyed using a qualitative data collection instrument to determine how this sample pool supports their undergraduate students emotionally once they have returned from a credit bearing semester abroad. This capstone examines how institutions are moving students toward the fourth stage of Kolb’s (1984) Experiential Learning Cycle: Active Experimentation. Through this lens, a multitude of reentry approaches are explored with the aim being a comparison of the several …

A Debriefing Technique In High-Fidelity Patient Simulation And Competent Decision-Making Abilities Among Nursing Students, Trena Seago

Theses and Dissertations--Curriculum and Instruction

Nursing faculty are utilizing high-fidelity patient simulation (HPS) with debriefing to help engage nursing students in making competent clinical decisions. This quasi-experimental study examined the use of HPS with debriefing and students’ ability to make nursing care decisions using standardized exams. The experimental group received debriefing after HPS and the control group did not receive debriefing after HPS. The pre- and post-test assessed participants’ ability to make clinical care decisions. The analysis of the pre-test and post-test HESI scores showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups.