Educational Methods Commons^™

Adding Value Through Honors At The University Of Iowa: Effects Of A Pre-Semester Honors Class And Honors Residence On First-Year Students, Art L. Spisak, Robert F. Kirby, Emily M. Johnson

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Activities that take place early in students’ college career can strongly influence their academic engagement and success. Two experiences that honors programs may provide during the initial phases of the undergraduate experience are pre- or earlysemester programs and honors residence halls. This study compares honors students who lived in an honors residence hall and/or took part in a pre-semester academic, credit-bearing class upon entry into college to their honors peers who did not elect these options. It tracks the degree of the students’ subsequent engagement with the honors program and also several measures of their academic success, such as grade …

Contributions Of Small Honors Programs: The Case Of A Public Liberal Arts College, George Smeaton, Margaret Walsh

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The Keene State College Honors Program began as the vision of a former college president to attract more high-achieving students to this particular public liberal arts college. In the fall of 2007, after the college had secured initial funding, a small cohort of twenty first-year students were selected for the honors program by admissions staff for their achievements and promise. The numbers were intentionally small, but the goals were ambitious for a rural college that serves a high percentage of first-generation college students (43%). The students selected for admission into honors would enroll in an honors-level writing course and live …

Introduction: The Demonstrable Value Of Honors Education, Andrew J. Cognard-Black

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In May of 2016, a small cadre of scholars was called to the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, for the Honors Education Research Colloquium, a two-day meeting focusing on the future direction of research in honors education. The participants were assembled by Jerry Herron, who at the time was president of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC), close on the heels of a decision by the NCHC Board of Directors in June of the previous year to make research—along with professional development and advocacy—one of three strategic priorities.

After a day of presentations, in turn, by each …

The Value Added Of Honors Programs In Recruitment, Retention, And Student Success: Impacts Of The Honors College At The University Of Mississippi, Robert D. Brown, Jonathan Winburn, Douglass Sullivan-González

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In a recent essay, M. Roy Wilson (2015), President of Wayne State University, and Jerry Herron, Dean of the Honors College, discuss the value added of honors programs in terms that should be familiar to numerous constituencies associated with honors education. Wilson and Herron write about honors education largely in terms of the experiences it provides students:

the [honors] college is not tied to any particular academic discipline; instead, it represents the virtues of a liberal education that reaches across departments, schools, and colleges. For our students, the aim is to integrate the specialized—and essential—knowledge of the disciplines into a …

Honors Education Has A Positive Effect On College Student Success, Dulce Diaz, Susan P. Farruggia, Meredith E. Wellman, Bette L. Bottoms

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Over 1,500 U.S. universities and colleges have honors programs or honors colleges to provide extra support for their most prepared students (National Collegiate Honors Council 2018; Scott and Smith 2016). Honors programs typically provide additional financial support, faculty mentors, smaller class sizes, and other benefits compared to what institutions can typically offer all of their students. Students involved in an honors program usually earn higher GPAs compared to highly motivated students not in an honors program (Pritchard and Wilson 2003) and are more likely to stay in college and graduate within four years (Cosgrove 2004).

The additional success of honors …

High-Impact Honors Practices: Success Outcomes Among Honors And Comparable High-Achieving Non-Honors Students At Eastern Kentucky University, Katie Patton, David Coleman, Lisa W. Kay

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Alexander Astin’s Inputs-Environment-Outcomes (I-E-O) model for longitudinal study of student success in higher education challenges researchers to account explicitly for the wide range of educational, social, and cultural backgrounds that students bring with them to college. Astin’s approach factors in an understanding that educational outcomes are associated not only with the various educational environments to which students are exposed during their college years, but also with the inputs of these students—the factors that shaped them long before they first arrived in a university classroom. Meaningful conclusions concerning factors that contribute to student success must take into account the complex interactions …

Gpa As A Product, Not A Measure, Of Success In Honors, Lorelle A. Meadows, Maura Hollister, Mary Raber, Laura Kasson Fiss

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Defining success is challenging. Yet schools and colleges across the country, indeed, around the world, seek to do it in order to demonstrate value. While we know that success depends upon a variety of skills that individuals develop into competencies, these can be difficult to measure in an academic setting. For example, as educators, we hope that success is an outcome of lifelong learning, but the measurement of lifelong learning requires sophisticated approaches that can be difficult to deploy across a broad population (Riley and Claris 2008). As a result, administrators and instructors will often gravitate toward more readily available …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: About The Authors, Richard Badenhausen, Hanne Ten Berge, Meg Case, Milton D. Cox, Susan E. Dinan, James Ford, Annmarie Guzy, Matthew Carey Jordan, Leslie G. Kaplan, Barbara J. Millis, Ken R. Mulliken, Dahliani Reynold, Becky L. Spritz, Janina Tosic, Rob Van Der Vaart, Todd Zakrajsek, John Zubizarreta, Jeffrey A. Portnoy

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

No abstract provided.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: The Honors Professional Development Portfolio: Claiming The Value Of Honors For Improvement, Tenure, And Promotion

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

All of us working in honors face a similar challenge when we are asked to account for the value of our efforts as teachers or leaders in our honors programs or colleges. Much of what we do is invisible to all but the most discerning and appreciative eyes: hours spent designing new courses and pedagogical approaches; advising students on curricular, career, and personal matters; coordinating faculty and student development opportunities; forging beneficial alliances across campus to grow and strengthen our institutional areas; collaborating with students on research projects; drafting grants and other proposals; maintaining alumnae relations; leading students to academic …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Constructing An Honors Composition Course To Support A Research-Based Honors Curriculum

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

As the research focus of post-secondary honors education intensifies, the honors composition course can be designed to support this mission by introducing students to discipline-specific research tools and argumentation styles while building an interdisciplinary community of scholars who can debate issues both within and outside their fields. Not only do students develop skills in selecting, reading, and writing researched academic arguments, but they also gain insight into the publication and presentation processes as related to professional development in a given discipline. Students learn how publishers and editors serve as gatekeepers of what is considered knowledge in a field, how researchers …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Building And Enhancing Honors Programs Through Faculty Learning Communities

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Many important institutional concerns and opportunities, observes John R. Cosgrove, involve honors programs and colleges, such as their impact on undergraduate academic performance, retention, and graduation (Cosgrove). Another consideration for honors programs is the area of curriculum revision or enhancement, for example, increasing ethical inquiry across courses in the honors curriculum. Others involve inspiring faculty to create new honors courses, adjusting criteria for student requirements and recognition, initiating joint enterprises with liberal education and STEM programs, and advancing the role of the honors curriculum in advocating change across the institution. These opportunities beckon solutions that can be investigated and proposed …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Foreword, Richard Badenhausen

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

When I first stumbled upon honors education over two decades ago while team-teaching a seminar called “Poetry and the Condition of Music,” it was the freedom inside and outside the classroom that most caught my attention. Sprung from the shackles of my usual British Literature survey, one in which students trudged through a rigid chronology of canonical authors, I was free to design a course with the university’s choral director that put ancient oral poets in dialogue with rap musicians; that explored the collaboration between W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten; that set Langston Hughes against crucial jazz influences. Additionally, …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Reading To Improve Teaching And Learning, John Zubizarreta

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Scholarship on teaching and learning has exploded in volume and influence in recent decades, providing all of us who are dedicated to improving our roles as professors with a dizzying array of books and other resources. Faculty development as a specific area of study and professional growth and centers designed to promote and support better teaching (often called CETLs for Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning or CATLs for Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning) have multiplied on campuses around the globe.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Teaching For Learning In Honors Courses: Identifying And Implementing Effective Educational Practices

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Teaching and learning are interesting endeavors. As faculty members, we spend a great deal of time working with students to help them understand a concept, a fact, or a point of view, but we often do not spend equal time better understanding and improving teaching and learning. Time and again, individual educators note that they were trained in a given discipline, not in the process of teaching. In most states, it takes more credentialing in teaching to become a first-grade instructor in math than it does to teach a graduate seminar in psychology. Because of the assumption that those who …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Using Student-Generated Questions To Promote Learning

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Faculty who teach gifted honors students often ask themselves, “How can I ask questions that foster higher-order thinking?” “How can I get more students to respond?” “How can I ensure that students are learning from question-based discussions?” Another key concern: “How can I get students to begin interacting with each other rather than conducting a discussion much like a ping-pong match where the rapid exchanges occur only between a single student and me and then another student and me?” This last question can lead faculty to a different model of questioning, one in which students generate questions that are then …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Honors Components In Honors Faculty Development

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

In this chapter we describe the design characteristics of a professional development course about honors teaching. We claim that the principles of learning and teaching in honors are also applicable to the design of a course for honors faculty.

The context of our research is Utrecht University in The Netherlands, a large and high-ranking research university that offers undergraduate and graduate programs in a wide variety of academic disciplines. Dutch higher education does not have a longstanding

tradition in honors; Utrecht University was among the first research universities that started experimenting with honors programs in the 1990s. The rationale was …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Linking Honors Courses: A New Approach To Defining Honors Pedagogy

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The shift in higher education toward outcome-based learning represents a significant opportunity for honors. By removing disciplinary boundaries related to teaching content knowledge, outcome-based learning increases opportunities for connecting student learning across courses within well-defined honors curricula. It also empowers honors students, many of whom are eager to take leadership of their educational experiences, to extend their learning in new ways. This essay presents an example of how drawing connections across honors courses within a curriculum creates unique opportunities for engaged, transformative learning and, unexpectedly, for the development of an honors program identity.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Perspectives On Twentieth-Century American Identity

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At Southern Oregon University, a course designated as HON 315: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century American Identity has been developed and offered with a high degree of success for several terms. Its pedagogical flexibility, high level of student participation, and exceptionally high course-evaluation ratings from students indicate that it might serve as a useful model for honors programs and colleges as a lower-level honors course in United States history or perhaps adapted to other disciplines. The course description is as follows:

This course is a study of the development of the United States in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, focusing …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Innovative Discussion-Based Pedagogy

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Psychologists have identified a series of specific kinds of learning experiences that confer broad and lasting educational benefits, contributing to overall professional success regardless of field. These benefits include developing creativity, problem-solving, cognitive complexity, and flexibility (Maddux et al.); working well in diverse or dispersed groups; negotiating interpersonal problems (Tadmor et al.); tolerating ambiguity; pursuing cultural engagement; appreciating diversity; and being open to experience (Shadowen et al.). This research is important because it provides evidence for the longterm impact of certain experiences on ways of thinking rather than their short-term ability to help students pass exams. The research argues powerfully …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Bending Time And Space: Three Approaches For Breaking Barriers In The Honors Classroom

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Varying the typical format of the honors classroom is a great way to encourage creative thinking. When students become accustomed to what to expect from a class, they are often able to fulfill requirements with minimal effort. An unusual and challenging course experience requires students to focus, to think in new ways about their learning. This is part of why courses abroad are often so transformational: students constantly have to adjust to their new environment. The challenge for teachers like me who love leading courses abroad is how to create similarly engaging experiences at home. Using unusual course structures, meeting …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Growing Pains In Honors Education: Two Courses Designed To Build Community

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Honors programs and colleges that seek substantial growth face a number of challenges. Two of the most prominent are maintaining a strong sense of community within the honors student population and finding sufficient faculty to teach honors courses. A different, but not entirely unrelated, challenge is presented by part-time students, some of whom may be excellent candidates for honors but whose outside commitments make it impossible for them to carry a full course load or regularly attend classes during business hours. In what follows, I will provide an overview of two honors courses whose design can help meet the two …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Introduction

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

At times, when honors education comes up in academic or popular conversations, a common and automatic response seems to prevail: an assumption that honors means faster, broader, more complicated, and more expert delivery of content information on the part of the teacher and greater, more efficient acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and higher achievement on tests or essays on the part of the student. What the instructor teaches in terms of countable amounts of information and what the student produces in terms of quantitatively measurable outcomes rule the day.

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: The Importance Of The First-Semester Experience: Learning Communities And Clustered Classes

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I served as Director of the Honors College at William Paterson University for ten years in a half-time capacity while I also worked as a Professor of History. Last year, I took a new position as the Dean of the Pforzheimer Honors College at Pace University. Both honors colleges have special courses for first-semester honors students that are meant to help successful high school students transition into successful college students. First-semester consolidated courses can offer honors students an experience that is challenging and rigorous and that helps them to better understand the expectations of professors and the staff of the …

Breaking Barriers In Teaching And Learning: Selected Book Resources

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Achacoso, M. V., and M. D. Svinicki, editors. Alternative Strategies

for Evaluating Student Learning. New Directions for Teaching

and Learning, No. 100. Jossey-Bass, 2005.

Allen, M. J. Assessing Academic Programs in Higher Education,

Jossey-Bass, 2004.

Anderson, L. W., D. R. Krathwohl, and B. S. Bloom. A Taxonomy

for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy

of Educational Objectives. Longman, 2001.

Angelo, T. A., and K. P. Cross. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A

Handbook for College Teachers. 2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Arreola, R. A. Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System:

A Handbook for College Faculty and …

One Size Does Not Fit All: When Honors Housing May Not Work, Laura Feitzinger Brown

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The gracious donor, the dean, and the other honors program director and I walk down the corridor of an old campus building needing repair but possessing a great deal of charm. While a science classroom building is being renovated, this hall houses temporary offices for displaced faculty. We look at the high ceilings in a room now used as a faculty break room and admire the way the morning sunlight plays on the walls. This room would make an amazing honors student lounge. Renovating the entire building would create a terrific honors dorm that could attract talented prospective students and …

It Came With Everything: A Baby Grand Piano, Hardwood Floors, Regular Flooding, 200 Honors Students, And A Live-In Scholar, Gloria Cox

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

When the University of North Texas (UNT) opened its new Honors Hall on a hot Sunday in late August 2007, it was a residence hall in which everyone took considerable pride. Students loved the many amenities that the building featured, and they took pride in being able to call Honors Hall home. From the perspective of the honors college, the most significant feature was an apartment in which a scholar would live—a scholar who would be involved in the life of the hall and would, therefore, be engaged with the students who lived there. At that time, no other residence …

Where Honors Lives: Results From A Survey Of The Structures And Spaces Of U.S. Honors Programs And Colleges, Linda Frost, Lisa W. Kay

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

The ninth item on the National Collegiate Honors Council’s (2014b) list of “Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program” reads:

The program is located in suitable, preferably prominent, quarters on campus that provide both access for the students and a focal point for honors activity. Those accommodations include space for honors administrative, faculty, and support staff functions as appropriate. They may include space for an honors lounge, library, reading rooms, and computer facilities. If the honors program has a significant residential component, the honors housing and residential life functions are designed to meet the academic and social needs of …

Living To Learn, Learning For Life: Housing Honors Classrooms And Offices In An Honors Residence Hall, Karen Lyons

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I left the interview with high-hopes: being Assistant Director of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Honors Program sounded like an excellent fit for me. A full-time job, a real income, and no longer having to depend on year-to-year contracts as an adjunct were appealing. The opportunity to teach tied into my strengths, and since I had taught UNL honors classes previously, I knew the high quality of the students. I also knew the director and was excited about the prospect of working with him. As I wended my way, in heels and suit, through the extensive construction going on in the …

Building Community In Árbol De La Vida, Patricia Maccorquodale

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

Building community has been part of the mission of the University of Arizona Honors College since its founding in 1962. In 2011, a new honors residence hall opened that epitomizes its community of scholars. This essay explores how an honors hall— through its design and programming—can build community, emphasize sustainability, facilitate learning, and encourage an outward focus. This housing experience reinforces the values and goals of honors education and contributes to a personalized, close-knit community in the context of a large, public university.

Honors Space: What To Do When There Isn’T Any, Joy Ochs

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs: Chapters

I direct a small honors program from my faculty office in the English Department at Mount Mercy University, which is an institution that is outgrowing its tiny campus. It is an exciting time, with new graduate programs and athletic facilities being added. But there is not enough space. At the end of May 2013, a memo from Academic Affairs made this request: “please contact your students to pack up any personal items they have left in the Honors Lounge, as we need to repurpose that room over the summer.” I have received a memo like this about every year or …