Educational Methods Commons^™

Opening Doors: Facilitating Transfer Students’ Participation In Honors, Patrick Bahls

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Those of us who reflect on our work as honors educators and administrators are more certain than ever that honors programs and colleges are critical sites for development of equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education. Numerous roundtable discussions and research presentations at recent regional and national honors conferences signal this awareness as do equally numerous honors-related publications, including two monographs released through the National Collegiate Honors Council; Setting the Table for Diversity, edited by Coleman and Kotinek, and Occupy Honors Education, edited by Coleman, Kotinek, & Oda. Lisa Coleman opens the former volume with a series of questions that …

Gifted Students, Honors Students, And An Honors Education, Jaclyn M. Chancey, Jennifer Lease Butts

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The seeming lack of connection between honors and gifted education has puzzled us for some time. Both of us incorporated gifted education and higher education into our doctoral studies, and both of our dissertations used gifted education theories as lenses into the honors student experience. Our lives as researchers and higher education administrators have been spent in the shared space between gifted students and honors programs. We know that this combination strengthens our work with the University of Connecticut Honors Program, and we are excited at the possibility of greater collaboration between the two fields. In this essay, we will …

Dedication -- Lisa Lynn Coleman

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors director, diversity advocate, book editor, journal reviewer, Virginia Woolf scholar, yoga and Pilates instructor—Lisa Coleman is a modern-day Renaissance woman. Recently retired as English Professor and Honors Director at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Lisa has been a moving force in the National Collegiate Honors Council for two decades. Most NCHC members know her as the instigator and implementer of the Diversity Forums at the annual conferences for the past fifteen years or so. An active member and often chair of the Diversity Committee during that time, she has also been contributing co-editor to two monographs on diversity in honors …

Honors Is A Good Fit For Gifted Students— Or Maybe Not, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the field of composition studies, a core pedagogical objective is to familiarize students with types of argumentation strategies, such as causation, evaluation, narration, rebuttal, and definition. Introducing definition arguments in their textbook Good Reasons: Researching and Writing Effective Arguments, Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer state that “[d]efinition arguments set out criteria and then argue whatever is being defined meets or does not meet those criteria. Rarely do you get far into an argument without having to define something” (97). They identify three categories of definition—formal, operational, and by example—and then apply these to sample documents. For my honors composition …

Are You Gifted-Friendly? Understanding How Honors Contexts (Can) Serve Gifted Young Adults, Jonathan D. Kotinek

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

I was tangentially aware of gifted education while I was in elementary and middle school, but my first real awareness of the concept came through my work in the University Honors Program at Texas A&M. In truth, I was not yet working for the University Honors Program; I was a graduate assistant for then-Associate Director, Finnie Coleman, who tasked me with helping host a group of Davidson Young Scholars visiting campus for a lecture from Stephen Hawking to mark the opening of the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy in 2003. I was hired into a full-time role in …

Not So Gifted: Academic Identity For Black Women In Honors, A. Musu Davis

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors students are often regarded as the best and brightest at their universities, but the standard definitions of high achievement are not always useful for identifying talented undergraduate Black women. In a qualitative study of Black women in honors inside and outside the classroom at two urban predominantly white universities (PWIs), data derived from the students’ experiences provide insights about the standard labels of high achievement in higher education. The voices of these women expand the discourse on student academic identity. Picture one of these honors students: Anissa wipes her finger through the word “gifted,” which is written on the …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council 19.2 (Fall/Winter 2018)

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Forum Essays on “Gifted Education and Honors”

Gifted Education to Honors Education: A Curious History, a Vibrant Future — Nicholas Colangelo

Honors Is a Good Fit for Gifted Students—Or Maybe Not — Annmarie Guzy

Are You Gifted-Friendly? Understanding How Honors Contexts (Can) Serve Gifted Young Adults — Jonathan D. Kotinek

If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When? — Betsy Greenleaf Yarrison

Gifted Students, Honors Students, and an Honors Education . Jaclyn M. Chancey and Jennifer Lease Butts

Ways We Can Do Better: Bridging the Gap Between Gifted Education and Honors Colleges . Angie L. Miller

Not So Gifted: Academic …

The Value Of Honors: A Study Of Alumni Perspectives On Skills Gained Through Honors Education, Christopher M. Kotschevar, Surachat Ngorsuraches, Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors education is often marketed as a means to offer enhanced value to a collegiate education. This value has the capacity to bolster a student’s academic experience, to add to his or her comprehensive skill set, to enhance a resumé, and to improve professional development. Ernest Pascarella argued that theoretical value without data is often used to justify collegiate programs such as honors and criticized those practices for lacking research and data to validate the claim of enhanced value. The current research was designed to obtain validation by eliciting the perspectives of alumni from South Dakota State University’s (SDSU’s) Honors …

A Mixed Methods Study Exploring The Relationship Of Cognitive And Motivational Factors To Sonography Student Performance, Renee Hathaway

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to examine relationships between sonography students’ levels of self-regulation and self-efficacy and their performance in a 16-week introductory vascular sonography skills laboratory course. Measures for the study were designed to yield qualitative and quantitative data related to student goals, strategies, and course performance, and were generated by both students and faculty. Qualitative data from the study included student self-reports of self-regulatory strategies and instructor evaluations of student performance, while quantitative data were provided by instructor and student ratings of performance, student self-efficacy ratings, and student reports on their use of deliberate practice. …

Sharing Identity: Indexing Cultural Perspectives Through Writing Responses To Graphic Novels, Alex Romagnoli

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Indexing identity through writing responses among ELL students in response to a graphic novel helps provide insight into how writing responses represent people and how graphic novels can aid in that process of self-discovery through their inherent multimodalities. This study takes looks at four students in an ELL class at an urban high school in southern Pennsylvania as they responded in writing to a portion of Will Eisner's New York: Life in the Big City (2006). All of the participants took events from the portion of the graphic novel provided to them and indexed their urban, cultural perspectives through their …

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On How The Use Of Toon Comic Books During Guided Reading Influenced Learning By Struggling Readers, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger, Gina M. Doepker, Samantha Mcgeorge

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The study presented in this article examines the use of comic books, specifically the TOON comic books during guided reading instruction. The instruction was provided to struggling readers by the Literacy Center at a comprehensive university in southeastern United States. What most pre-service teachers in this study agreed upon was that comic books served as an effective tool for getting their students interested in reading. Reading comic books with tutors as partners in conversation with the struggling readers in this study was also a powerful medium for facilitating students’ literacy skills development, particularly in the areas of reading fluency and …

Multiple True–False Questions Reveal The Limits Of The Multiple-Choice Format For Detecting Students With Incomplete Understandings, Brian A. Couch, Joanna K. Hubbard, Chad E. Brassil

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

By having students select one answer among several plausible options, multiple-choice (MC) questions capture a student’s preferred answer but provide little information regarding a student’s thinking on the remaining options. We conducted a crossover design experiment in which similar groups of introductory biology students were assigned verbatim questions in the MC format or multiple true–false (MTF) format, which requires students to separately evaluate each option as either true or false. Our data reveal that nearly half of the students who select the correct MC answer likely hold incorrect understandings of the other options and that the selection rates for individual …

See It & Believe It: Assessing Professional Behaviors And Clinical Reasoning With Video Assignments, Grace Johnson, Megan Frazee

Innovation in Pedagogy and Technology Symposium

See It & Believe It (Assessing Professional Behaviors & Clinical Reasoning with Video Assignments)

Olive Branch

Grace Johnson (UNMC), Megan Frazee (UNMC)

Professional behaviors and clinical reasoning skills are developed through repetition, modeling and multiple exposures. We developed video assignments in physical therapy education that allow students to integrate didactic knowledge into clinical cases. These assignments require students to demonstrate appropriate professional behaviors, psychomotor skills and clinical reasoning required for physical therapy patient management. For all video assignments, students are required to upload their videos into Canvas, view the work of their peers and provide constructive feedback. These video assignments …

Supporting English Language Learners Inside The Mathematics Classroom: One Teacher’S Unique Perspective Working With Students During Their First Years In America, Amy Marie Fendrick

Research and Evaluation in Education, Technology, Art, and Design

Reflecting upon my personal experiences teaching mathematics to English Language Learners (ELL) in a public high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, this essay largely focuses on the time I spent as the only Accelerated Math teacher in my school building. From 2012 – 2017, I taught three different subjects at this high school: Advanced Algebra, Algebra, and Accelerated Math. This essay highlights why I chose to become a math and ELL teacher, as well as the challenges, issues, struggles, and successes I experienced during my time teaching. I focus on the challenges I faced teaching students who did not share my …

Concepts In Animal Parasitology: Permission To Publish Agreement, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries

Concepts in Animal Parasitology

Blank Permission to Publish agreement form for authors of the Concepts in Animal Parasitology textbook/open educational resource.

Concepts In Animal Parasitology: Information For Authors [Slides], Sue Ann Gardner, Scott Lyell Gardner

Concepts in Animal Parasitology

Broadcast via Zoom live online, the following are the slides from an information session held for authors and reviewers of the Concepts in Animal Parasitology textbook. The work will be written collaboratively and published in 2024 as an open educational resource under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license.

Perceptions Of Advisors Who Work With High-Achieving Students, Melissa Johnson, Cheryl Walther, Kelly J. Medley

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors programs in higher education are designed to optimize highachieving students’ potential by addressing their particular academic and developmental needs and common characteristics. Gerrity, Lawrence, and Sedlacek suggested that high-achieving students can be “best served by course work, living environments, and activities that differ from the usual college offerings” (43). Schuman, in his handbook Beginning in Honors, noted:

"An important point to keep in mind as regards honors advising is that honors students can be expected to have as many, and as complicated, problems as other students. It is sometimes tempting to envision all honors students as especially well …

How To Drink From The Pierian Spring: A Liberal Arts And Humanities Question About The Limits Of Honors Education, Christopher Keller

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Honors educators frequently engage in conversations about the decline of interest in and funding for the liberal arts and humanities. Larry Andrews’s essay “The Humanities are Dead! Long Live the Humanities!” is one of several that contributes to a metanarrative about the liberal arts and humanities, playing out along the following lines: workforce-minded politicians, short-sighted university administrators, STEM-related programs, and market-driven students no longer understand the true value of the liberal arts and humanities because they cannot be easily measured in dollars and cents; consequently, higher education today typically narrows students’ perspectives, facilitates short-term and uncritical thinking, and fails to …

Linking Academic Excellence And Social Justice Through Community-Based Participatory Research, Lydia Voigt

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Naomi Yavneh Klos poses two questions for the NCHC community in her essay, “Thinking Critically, Acting Justly,” which appears in this issue of JNCHC: (1) how honors pedagogy/curriculum can engage the highestability and most motivated students in questions of social justice; and (2) how the honors curriculum can serve as a place of access, equity, and excellence in higher education. The University Honors Program (UHP) at Loyola University New Orleans has recently implemented several honors social justice seminars that have been experimenting with various approaches to these pedagogical, curricular, and programmatic questions. Violence and Democracy, an honors sociology/criminology seminar, not …

Creating A National Readership For Harper’S Weekly In A Time Of Sectional Crisis, Ashlyn Stewart

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

PORTZ-PRIZE-WINNING ESSAY, 2017

Throughout the 1840s and ’50s, localized and specialized periodicals serving specific regions, religions, pastimes, and vocations inundated the American magazine market (Lupfer 249). The vast majority of these publications were short-lived; Heather A. Haveman, a sociologist who in 2015 conducted a quantitative analysis of historical American magazines, estimates that the average lifespan of a magazine between 1840 and 1860 was a mere 1.9 years (29). As book historian Eric Lupfer says, “most were risky ventures— undercapitalized, poorly advertised, haphazardly managed, and with limited circulation” (249). However, magazines with the stability and capital of a sponsoring publishing house, …

What Makes A Curriculum Significant? Tracing The Taxonomy Of Significant Learning In Jesuit Honors Programs, Robert J. Pampel

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Over the last few years, I have sat in the opening sessions of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference and felt equal parts concern and conviction. In 2015 and 2016, opening speakers enumerated the challenges and opportunities that confront honors educators in a rapidly changing higher education landscape. I sympathized with their concerns in an institutional and cultural context marked by what Schwehn called the “Weberian ethos” of education—an instrumental, and less charitable, attitude toward academic inquiry. Yet, even as I acknowledged the veracity of their arguments, I was buoyed by belief in the Jesuit mission that animates my …

Editor's Introduction (Vol. 9, No. 1), Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Even in these perplexing times, most citizens of the United States would agree that social injustices in this country need to be addressed and alleviated. Most would acknowledge the high rates of poverty, hunger, illiteracy, incarceration, economic inequality, racial discrimination, and bias in college admissions, for instance, that undermine the ideals essential to a thriving democracy. The challenge, though, is getting beneath these abstractions to a level of empathy that can bring about change. While the National Collegiate Honors Council has taken on this challenge in years past, the energy and commitment required to meet the challenge has generally waned …

Thinking Critically, Acting Justly, Naomi Yavneh Klos

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In October 2011, just two months after I became Director of the University Honors Program at Loyola New Orleans, my new home town was simultaneously proclaimed both “America’s Best City for Foodies” (Forbes) and the country’s “Worst Food Desert” (Lammers). The city known for beignets and crawfish, Mardi Gras and jazz, was revealed to have only one supermarket for each 16,000 residents (half the national average), with some residents traveling over fifteen miles from their homes to purchase fresh produce.

In the past six years, the situation has been somewhat ameliorated by multiple farmers markets throughout the city that accept …

Journal Of The National Collegiate Honors Council, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018): Forum On Honors And Social Justice, National Collegiate Honors Council

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers

Editorial Policy, Deadlines, and Submission Guidelines

Dedication to Jack W. Rhodes

Editor’s Introduction — Ada Long

Forum on “Honors And Social Justice”

Thinking Critically, Acting Justly . — Naomi Yavneh Klos

Making Honors Success Scripts Available to Students from Diverse Backgrounds — Richard Badenhausen

Cultivating Empathy: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Service-Learning Course — Megan Jacobs and Marygold Walsh-Dilley

Socioeconomic Equity in Honors Education: Increasing Numbers of First-Generation and Low-Income Students — Angela D. Mead

Social Justice Education in Honors: Political but Non-Partisan — Sarita Cargas

Research Essays

What Makes a Curriculum Significant? Tracing the Taxonomy …

Making Honors Success Scripts Available To Students From Diverse Backgrounds, Richard Badenhausen

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In her lead forum essay, Naomi Yavneh Klos thoughtfully encourages us to reexamine our admissions practices in honors. She argues,

"We need a more nuanced reevaluation of standards that recognizes the role of systemic bias in traditional metrics of academic excellence and that holistically evaluates each student’s strengths and challenges in the context of individual and cultural experience. Such practices strengthen honors by identifying a diverse spectrum of students who both benefit from and enrich our honors community. (8)"

I would like to take that call for reevaluation one step further by asking members of the honors community to interrogate …

Social Justice Education In Honors: Political But Non-Partisan, Sarita Cargas

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, Neil Gross introduces research that suggests fifty to sixty percent of college professors are leftist or liberal, a much higher proportion than the seventeen percent of Americans in general (7). He posits the conservative fear that “bias” in higher education is a “very serious” problem (Gross 5). April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner examine studies that also show that college students are more ideologically diverse than the professoriate (498) and, further, that students tend to discredit information presented by biased professors and consider them untrustworthy sources (499). If the majority …

Cultivating Empathy: Lessons From An Interdisciplinary Service-Learning Course, Megan Jacobs, Marygold Walsh-Dilley

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In “Thinking Critically, Acting Justly,” Naomi Yavneh Klos suggests that the key questions for honors education and social justice are first “how to engage our highest-ability and most motivated students in questions of justice” and second “how honors can be a place of access, equity, and excellence in higher education.” These goals are both important and complementary; achieving the latter helps achieve the former. Honors education creates a fruitful space for inclusion where the knowledge and experience of diverse students develop skills oriented toward justice for the whole community. Making honors a place of access and equity prompts deeper engagement …

From Campus To Corporation: Using Developmental Assessment Centers To Facilitate Students’ Next Career Steps, Rick R. Jacobs, Kaytlynn R. Griswold, Kristen L. Swigart, Greg E. Loviscky, Rachel L. Heinen

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

introduction

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. —Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Honors graduates have much to learn when transitioning into their first position after college. For instance, workplaces have an entirely different culture and set of expectations from undergraduate honors classrooms (Wendlandt & Rochlen). Furthermore, the skills they need to become successful employees or graduate students are different from those required of successful honors college students, with a greater emphasis on communication skills (Stevens) as one example.

Honors students are bright, curious, and hard-working (Achterberg), and honors programs give …

General Strain Theory And Prescription Drug Misuse Among Honors Students, Jordan Pedalono, Kelly Frailing

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty years of age, having surpassed deaths from guns, HIV, and even car crashes. Clearly driving this trend is prescription drug misuse, especially of opioids. Of the over 62,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 alone, a full third resulted from the misuse of prescription opioids such as Oxycodone, Hydrocodone, Vicodin, and Morphine (Katz; NIDA; see also DHS). Evidence indicates that college students are among those losing their lives each year to prescription drug misuse (Spencer), but many facets of prescription drug misuse, including types, prevalence, and especially explanations, are …

Socioeconomic Equity In Honors Education: Increasing Numbers Of First-Generation And Low-Income Students, Angela D. Mead

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Many honors administrators can cite the numbers and percentages of students of color and statistics on the male to female ratio. Public institutions might cite in-state to out-of-state comparisons. For most, however, socioeconomic status is low on their list, if there at all, even though it is an important measure of diversity. First-generation college students, neither of whose parents has a baccalaureate degree, make up 58% of college enrollments (Redford & Hoyer). Students with a Pell Grant, which qualifies them as having a low-income background, compose 33% of the American higher education population (Baum et al.). Approximately 24% of college …