Gifted Education Commons^™

Beyond Bookkeeping: Developing Intellectual Skills In Honors Accounting Courses, L. Benjamin Boyar

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Critical thinking skills are sharpened in an introductory accounting course requiring students to think and write about contemporary issues connected to their discipline. Students are tasked to explicate opinions involving shareholders and stakeholders as expressed in a New York Times editorial by U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer and to present an argumentative essay that demonstrates practical disciplinary competencies and understanding of procedural knowledge. The challenges and rewards of teaching writing in technical disciplines are discussed.

Teaching Critical University Studies: A First-Year Seminar To Cultivate Intentional Learners, Elizabeth Bleicher

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The first-year seminar Why Are We Here? Student Culture and the Problem of College (WAWH) helps high-achieving students become motivated agents in their education by changing attitudes toward themselves, college, and their roles as students. The author presents the intentional design, execution, analysis, and results of the WAWH seminar, a curriculum that combines content and methods from the discipline of Critical University Studies, layered high-impact practices, studentcurated and student-led discussions, and explicit instruction on metacognition in teaching and learning. The decennial study (2008–2018) involves eighteen sections and over 300 students, all with similar written assignments, reflections, and final course evaluations. …

Breaking The Rules: Bringing Calculus Into The Humanities Classroom, Brent M. Blackwell

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Calculus in an honors humanities course offers students of different learning styles, interests, and aptitudes an opportunity to understand and appreciate the full range of the humanities, including natural science and mathematics. Students investigate the intellectual history and development of the calculus by reading work by and about Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton. Without having to understand any of the mathematics, students explore the rich intellectual debates that characterize the late seventeenth century and in so doing help bridge the traditional STEM-non-STEM divide that exists today.

National Security Council Role-Playing Simulation, Steve Elliott-Gower

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The first-year seminar Global Challenges fosters critical thinking by tasking honors students (n = 16) with role-playing in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Model Diplomacy program. Curricular objectives and assignments are presented.

Emphasizing Co-Curricular Experiences To Address Increasing Honors Enrollment And Diminishing Resources, Jason T. Hilton

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A program giving equal emphasis to honors coursework and targeted co-curricular experience provides one solution for a public university facing both increases in enrollment and decreases in financial resources. Undergraduate research, study abroad, and campus leadership provide high-impact experiences to students for honors credit. Measurable outcomes are presented.

On Being An Honors Dean, Andrew Martino

Honors in Practice Online Archive

The author reflects on the challenges of transitioning from faculty to firsttime dean of an honors college.

Office Hours: An Honors First-Year Experience Assignment, Cathlena Martin

Honors in Practice Online Archive

An assignment tasks students with scheduling, preparing for, and reflecting on the experience of meeting with a professor during office hours. Student expectations and experiences are presented.

The Commonplace Book Project, Kate Krueger

Honors in Practice Online Archive

A writing requirement for first-year honors students (n ≈ 250) provides a flexible format that combines primary texts, analytical skills, and personal reflection.

Brave New Worlds: Transcending The Humanities/Stem Divide Through Creative Writing, Adam Watkins, Zahra Tehrani

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Creative writing offers a critical and innovative form of inquiry promoting integrative learning that transcends disciplinary barriers. Authors first provide an overview of the scholarship on creative writing pedagogy, its unique capacity to engage a range of knowledge domains, and its significance for honors education. They then offer primary examples of incorporating creative writing projects into two honors classes that bridge STEM fields and the humanities. Analyses of student reflections (n = 35) in relation to learning outcomes strongly suggest that creative writing helps students explore course concepts through several ways of knowing—critical, situational, and affective—while fostering new perspectives on …

A Meaningful And Useful Twofer: Enhancing Honors Students’ Research Experiences While Gathering Assessment Data, Mary Scheuer Senter

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Engaging students in assessment practice benefits honors students, faculty, and administrators. Students gain meaningful research experience while honors programs receive data to help assess student learning and prepare for program review. A one-semester course, Program Evaluation Experiences, tasks students (n = 10) with collecting and analyzing data from peers and faculty and then articulating its value for their personal academic development. Qualitative and quantitative instruments and measures include an online survey (Qualtrics), personal interviews (Rev), and focus groups (rev, n = 30). Students complete various analyses of data using SPSS and NVivo. Results indicate that students’ active participation in applied …

Statistics: A Cautionary Tale, Len Zane

Honors in Practice Online Archive

Many of the numbers used to assess students are statistical in nature. The theoretical context underlying the production of a typical number or statistic used in student assessment is presented. The author urges readers to recognize objective data as subjective information and to carefully consider the numbers that often determine admission, retention, and scholarship distribution in honors.

Building Honors Contracts: Insights And Oversights, Kristine A. Miller

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs

Acknowledgments

Building Honors Contracts: Insights and Oversights, Kristine A. Miller

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

The Timeliness of Honors Contracts, Shirley Shultz Myers and Geoffrey Whitebread

Honors Contracts: Empowering Students and Fostering Autonomy in Honors Education, Anne Dotter

An Undeserved Reputation: How Contract Courses Can Work for a Small Honors Program , Jon Hageman

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

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

Enhancing the Structure and Impact of Honors by Contract Projects with Templates and …

Internationalizing Honors, Kim Klein, Mary Kay Mulvaney

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs

This monograph takes a “holistic approach to internationalization. [It] highlights how honors programs and colleges have gone beyond providing often one-time, short-term international experiences for their students and made global issues and experiences central features of their honors curricular and co-curricular programming. It presents case studies that can serve as models for honors programs and colleges seeking to initiate and further their internationalization efforts and highlights the latest research on the impact of internationalization on our students, campuses, and communities.” * * * “Our hope is that this monograph will serve multiple audiences: faculty wishing to develop new globally focused …

The Demonstrable Value Of Honors Education: New Research Evidence, Andrew J. Cognard-Black, Jerry Herron, Patricia J. Smith

National Collegiate Honors Council Monographs

“We all know—instinctively, experientially—that what we as honors teachers and administrators do for our students adds value to their college education and general college experience. Providing hard, demonstrable evidence for that which we know in our bodies as it were . . . turns out not to be so easy, a fact anyone who has had to make the case for additional, or even simply continued, honors funding to a new dean or college president has likely encountered. The results presented in this volume provide, in a diversity of ways via a diversity of research approaches, the sorts of evidence …

“Marie” And “An Unusual Recourse”: English Translations Of German Early Romantic Stories, Meghan Leadabrand

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This project consists of English translations of two German early Romantic stories, “Marie” (1798) by Sophie Mereau and “Seltner Ausweg” (1823) by Luise Brachmann, as well as an introductory discussion of the authors, their significance in the Jena Circle of Romantic writers, and the translation process. The introduction incorporates research on both Mereau and Brachmann and German early Romanticism, as well as some research on translation theory. Overall, the project aims to make “Marie” and “Seltner Ausweg,” which have not previously been translated, available to an English-speaking audience and to highlight the work of two little known Romantic women writers. …

Honors In Practice, Volume 14 (2018) [Complete], Ada Long , Editor

Honors in Practice Online Archive

In This Issue

Dedication to Katherine E. Bruce

Editor’s Introduction, Ada Long

HIP Now

Including Families in the Honors Experience, Melissa L. Johnson

Hearing the Marginalized Voice in the Great Books Curriculum, Jennie Woodard

Student Preferences for Faculty-Led Honors Study Abroad Experiences, Nicholas R. Arens, Hanna Holmquist, and Rebecca C. Bott-Knutson

A Structured Course for Personal and Professional Development, Deirdre D. Ragan

HIP Then: The First Ten Years

Tenure and Promotion in Honors (Vol. 1, 2005), Rosalie Otero

Honors in Chile: New Engagements in the Higher Education System (Vol. 2, 2006), Juan Carlos Skewes, Carlos Alberto Cioce Sampaio, and Frederick …

Free To Hate: Can We Justify Curbing Hateful Speech?, Logan Drake

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Hate speech and free speech, and the relationship between the two, have been prominent in the news lately, especially regarding speech on college campuses. It seems to me, however, that the debate usually lacks nuance. One side is portrayed as being free speech absolutists, while the other is seen as creating rules and restrictions that send us down a road towards totalitarianism and tyranny. In reality, however, very few people actually desire either of these extremes. No one wants tyrannical totalitarianism, and nearly everyone will admit that there needs to be, at the very least, restrictions on who can speak …

Consanguinity On The Canvas: Studying Inbreeding In The Habsburg Dynasty Through Portraits, Megan Dillion

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

During the height of their rule in Spain and Austria, the Habsburgs intermarried in order to preserve a strong, purely royal bloodline and to ensure that a Habsburg remained on the throne. For the Habsburg kings in Spain from 1516 to 1700, limpieza de sangre, literally “purity of blood,” was a central principle among Iberian peoples by the fifteenth century that focused initially on keeping Jewish and Moorish blood out of prominent Catholic families. This standard had been crucial since the Reconquista -the gradual expulsion of the Moors which lasted from the 1100s to the 1400s -and took on a …

To What Extent Does Transcendental Meditation (Tm) Relieve Symptoms In Patients With Ptsd?, Sanya Dhami

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that is currently increasing among the general public. Unfortunately, researchers have yet to find an effective treatment. Due to the lack of treatment, Transcendental Meditation has become a popular option and may potentially be an alternative treatment therapy. The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which Transcendental Meditation (TM) relieves symptoms in patients with PTSD by analyzing brain activity. A comparison was also made between traditionally used PTSD therapies and TM. Because the research regarding this topic is relatively new and was more heavily focused on patients with …

Behind The Gavel And Under The Robe: Gender Performance In The Courthouse, Sonia Bosch

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Gender” (1987) as a theoretical framework, I aim to understand how men and women in judicial occupations navigate gender roles and power dynamics in a professional setting. Both men and women judges present themselves similarly in their attire and their completion of making rulings on cases. However, men and women show distinct differences in displays of emotion, professional behavior, and responses to challenges or conflicts in the courtroom. Female judges tend to operate in a poised, highly accountable, and emotionally restrained scope, while men tend to show more variation in their emotional displays and have a wider range of behaviors …

Palinoia, Jill Bond

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

The idea of restrictive and regimented female beauty standards is certainly not a new concept, but rarely are the repetitive, destructive, and exploitive aspects analyzed in a cinematic setting. This realization sparked the idea for Palinoia: a three minute and thirty-four second film dedicated to the artistic exploration of this very topic. Starting with the title itself, “palinoia” is defined as the obsessive or compulsive repetition of an action until it is mastered or perfect – a rather accurate statement when looked at in the context of female actions in response to societal beauty standards and expectations. This definition ultimately …

Utopia And Contemporary Human Society: A Model For Sustainable Continuance, David Blake Corman

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia outlines a bustling, blissful society in which all individuals live equitably, happily, and comfortably. Utopia, which literally means “no-place,” simply does not exist. However, More provides Utopia as a progressive template through which analogous contemporary social and economic structure may be assessed. Juxtaposing contemporary society with Utopia, a relatively superior or perfect state, illuminates some factors inhibiting modern society from otherwise ascending to the state and functionality of a Utopia.

Tears Of A Jester, Anjali Chacko

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

As I stared at my former doctor in her casket, I felt my throat tighten and the stomach acid climb up. Mary looked so different from the pictures her family had placed near her body. Her skin seemed thicker in death. She appeared much paler, almost sallow, and her body sagged in all the wrong ways. I joined the procession of mourners and thought about how poorly the makeup artist had done their job. I mean, it was bad—it looked as if someone had just slapped some lipstick all over her face and called it a day. I almost laughed …

Research In Contemporary Painting, Sutton Allen

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

With these works I am exploring the boundaries of contemporary image-making and oil painting, beginning with traditional paint application approaches such as grisailles, glazes, and scumbles, and ending with materials such as plaster, spray paint, and various chemicals. These images come from various mass media sources such as Google, The New York Times, and CNN. In making these paintings I have created and destroyed several times over the images that compose them in order to emulate the actual world of unknowing and falsehoods. Most importantly, I intend for these works to expand the overall vocabulary of painting and reestablish the …

She Asks For Something Hopeful, Alexander Lane

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

I reach into my pocket

searching

not for the cold-jagged teeth of car keys

—I was going to see him,

the autodidact—

not for almost empty key lime chapstick

—on our one and only coffee

date I took the plastic wrap

of the cap and frayed the edges

small—at first—then

larger—like a flower slow splitting

itself—

—apart—

Another Apocalypse, Jared Kohn

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

For a brief infinity, all was silent darkness, all were shadows layered lifelessly on top of one another, and the formless figures rattled only to breathe in the impossible abyss. There were no distinctions between woman and blanket, blanket and couch, couch and floor; light failed to reach the isolation of the living room. In fact, this living room seemed to exist before and after the passing of time, a perfect solitude that existed outside of the bells and whistles of the known gloom. The heat was heavy and the body hidden beneath layers of shadow and blanket lurched through …

Walking With Helen, Carter Johnson

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Walk with me, Helen.

Come walk in the Garden of the Gods.

Sit with me under the red rocks

and look - the snowy peaks reach at the sky.

This is a worthy spot to talk,

Here among the green and grand.

Helen, my love,

Your face launched a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium.

Your name will not die,

And your story will not cease.

But was it worth it?

Who Was Che Guevara?, Kaleb Harkins

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Explanation of Format

◼ To answer this question, I have chosen several musical selections that I feel represent different stages/aspects of Che’s life. For this presentation, I have provided links to these selections along with lyrics, and then a description of my reasoning for each piece.

Golden Honey, Dom Fonce

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

In the pews, the whispers say

the Eucharist discs delight

the tongue with a dab of golden honey.

I smell a tart perfume not far away.

There is a nakedness being raked

up and caked against me. I have come

here drunk and contrary, losing myself

in these halls—a hum sways from the podium

dais. I want to meet my maker calmly.

I want to beat my faith off walls.

My father’s shadow murmured the Lord’s

Prayer whenever I looked above. My eyes

were young and seething. He died at fifty—

shriveled down and minced, powder-soft,

Painting The Negative Space: How Faulkner Silhouettes The Living Ghost Of Flem Snopes, Jessica Fanczi

UReCA: The NCHC Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity

Like porch lights, mosquito bites, and last-minute glasses of sweet tea, ghost stories are an experience innate to the South after dark. Whether or not a person believes them, these tales have the ability to characterize houses, streets, even entire cities. For the citizens of Frenchman’s Bend in William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, convoluted stories of Antebellum and Civil War ghosts permeate the area. Distracted by the buried men of the past, the people of Frenchman’s Bend fail to realize that they themselves are living in one of the most sprawling, epic ghost stories ever to unfold in Mississippi: the story …