Gifted Education Commons^™

Editor’S Introduction 2, Ada Long

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

At least as much as the curricular or extracurricular opportunities that an honors program offers to students, its admissions and retention policies determine the teaching and learning that take place within it. In defining which students will be welcome in the community of honors, administrators broadcast their values before students even apply. If grades and test scores are the criteria for admission, then students can anticipate that the program will hold such competitive rankings in high regard. The higher the required grades and scores, the more rigorous the competition that students can expect. Students should also anticipate that retention policies …

Assessing Success In Honors: Getting Beyond Graduation Rates, Sean K. Kelly

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

An honors curriculum with realistic graduation requirements should have a respectable graduation rate. This number, when low, can indicate significant problems in the program. But a high graduation rate does not necessarily indicate success. A quality honors program, especially one that remains attentive to students’ ability to thrive, might have better measures available for judging impact and effectiveness. After all, manipulating a graduation rate is easy: make the curriculum excessively convenient and lower standards. While some honors curricula are perhaps unnecessarily rigid or unusually difficult, the faculty and administrators of most quality programs have managed to create a curriculum with …

Factors Influencing Honors College Recruitment, Persistence, And Satisfaction At An Upper-Midwest Land Grant University, Timothy J. Nichols, Kuo-Liang Matt Chang

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Student success and the “completion agenda” are important issues in higher education today (Complete College America). For honors programs and colleges, understanding and advancing these issues requires data-driven approaches tailored to the unique honors student population and broader institutional contexts. Honors faculty and administrators hoping to succeed in their recruitment, retention, and graduation efforts need an accurate understanding of why students decide to enroll and persist as well as their satisfaction with honors experiences. Our research data provide particular insight into the student experience at South Dakota State University (SDSU) but may also be instructive to a broader audience of …

About The Authors 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Scott Carnicom is a professor of psychology and an associate dean of the honors college at Middle Tennessee State University. Since 2012, he has also served as a special assistant in the provost’s office helping with a variety of initiatives. In 2011–12, he served as an ACE Fellow at Kenyon College.

Contents

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dedication to Hallie Ellis …

Predicting Student Success, Ameliorating Risk, And Guarding Against Homogeneity In Honors, Scott Carnicom

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Jerry Herron’s thought-provoking essay raised three key issues in my mind that I hope to describe in this humble response to his fine work. The overarching theme of his essay was to inquire how honors administrators predict student success and how they use that predictive power wisely and objectively to admit students and maintain quality. I want to expand on this idea and point out that such algorithms ideally could also predict students at risk so that institutional personnel could mobilize support efforts more proactively. Additionally, Herron notes the honors community’s appropriate and unyielding focus on academic quality at a …

Improving Retention And Fit By Honing An Honors Admissions Model, Patricia Joanne Smith, John Thomas Vitus Zagurski

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

For over a century, admissions officers and enrollment managers have relied on external validation of merit in selective admission of undergraduates. A main criterion used for selection is standardized testing, i.e., the SAT and ACT. Since these tests have been long-suspected and then shown to contain class and race biases while not accurately predicting retention (Banerji), the Schedler Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) shifted to a holistic, multi-criterion selection process, de-emphasizing standardized tests, and then analyzed the outcomes. The statistical analysis served two goals. The first was to test whether variables in the admissions model, developed …

Signifying Difference: The Nontraditional Student And The Honors Program, Nancy Reichert

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In their essay “Nontraditional Honors,” Janice Rye Kinghorn and Whitney Womack Smith state that students who are “twenty-five-years of age and older are usually considered nontraditional.” However, they first acknowledge that “traditional” and “nontraditional” are “constructed and slippery terms.” One of the most important ways that we as faculty and staff can serve our students through an honors education is to deconstruct terms such as “traditional” and “nontraditional” in order to show the significant gaps between the signifiers and the signified and to expose the negative connotations of a construct that is defined as not being the other construct.

John Boswell: Posting Historical Landmarks At The Leading Edge Of The Culture Wars, Jeffery Cisneros

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One of the most enduring and controversial figures in the field of history is John E. Boswell. His work on homosexuality and the history of the Christian Church was published at a key time during the Stonewall Riots in the late 1960s and the removal of homosexuality from the list of diagnostic mental disorders in the mid 1970s. This social upheaval created a dynamic that not only influenced Boswell personally but contributed to the vehement reaction to his book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. …

Nontraditional Honors And The Hopefulness Of Summer Reading, Angela M. Salas

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the summer of 2012, I had the good fortune to have my summer session course cancelled as a result of low enrollment. While unexpectedly losing a course and a salary was unpleasant, I undertook a reading program designed to help me improve our first-year honors classes. The sequence, Honors 103 and 104, is known as the Common Intellectual Experience (CIE), and it fulfills multiple general education requirements for all but our nursing students. In the course of the year, students read and respond to four texts (generally paired fiction and nonfiction works), prepare a guided, independent research project, give …

Undocumented In Honors, Kimberly Aramburo, Suketu Bhavsar

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In the Kellogg Honors College at Cal Poly Pomona, I (SB) have encountered several high-achieving students who, after coming to trust me, have revealed themselves to me as undocumented. These students came to the United States as children through non-legal channels, generally brought by their families, who were searching for opportunities or for escape from dangerous, oppressive situations in their home countries. These students have recently become known as “Dreamers,” after the Dream Acts being debated in the highest levels of government in the United States. Often first-generation college students, they are usually economically disadvantaged.

Real-Life Solutions To Real-Life Problems: Collaborating With A Non-Profit Foundation To Engage Honors Students In Applied Research, Emily Stark

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Colleges and universities have long emphasized undergraduate research experiences as valuable activities for students. The National Science Foundation (NSF) echoed this focus in 2003, recommending that all students get involved in undergraduate research as early as possible in their college careers (NSF). Collegiate honors programs in particular have embraced the role of student research as an integral experience for high-ability students, leading the way in developing the thesis-based model of undergraduate research that is increasingly common in institutions of higher learning.

About The Authors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Kimberly Aramburo is a Kellogg Honors College student at Cal Poly Pomona, where she is studying business administration. She hopes to attend law school and become a practicing criminal defense attorney in the future. She serves on the board of an undocumented support group on campus and hopes to make a difference for undocumented individuals.

The Confidence Game In Honors Admissions And Retention, Annmarie Guzy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

In “Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy,” Jerry Herron argues that “a well-conceived admissions policy tells us much more than whom to recruit; it becomes the basis for a quantitative defense of what we do with data and puts a convincing dollar value on the good evangel of excellence.” As a rhetorician who worked at an advertising agency in a previous life, I can certainly acknowledge the value of promoting a product, whether we are pitching our programs to prospective students or performing feats of statistical prestidigitation for upper administration. I am also, however, skeptical about administration’s increasing …

Mothers In Honors, Mimi Killinger, Rachel Binder-Hathaway, Paige Mitchell, Emily Patrick

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The University of Maine’s 2012 valedictorian, honors student Rachel Binder-Hathaway, gave her graduation speech via Skype last May as she had already begun a yearlong Fulbright Scholarship in Bangladesh. Rachel was putting to use her business and economics degrees, traveling to numerous villages in an effort to determine various best practices in microfinance while also isolating ineffective program elements. She intended to help Bangladeshi women grow their own successful small businesses and thus work their way out of relentless and abject poverty. Rachel is committed to assisting these women, who would otherwise have few opportunities outside the home, to create …

Nontraditional Honors, Janice Rye Kinghorn, Whitney Womack Smith

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

While honors programs and colleges often proclaim the importance of recruiting and retaining a diverse group of high-ability students, many are still exclusionary and predicated on assumptions about the student body that are no longer valid. In general, we assume that honors students matriculate straight from high school and, having no family obligations, are able to reside in honors living-learning communities, participate in co-curricular honors experiences, and take advantage of honors study abroad opportunities. The structure and programming of honors can thus prohibit the full participation of nontraditional students and compound the personal and psychological barriers that keep many talented, …

Dedication

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

With this issue we honor Deborah Sell Craig, longtime staff member at the Kent State University Honors College, who passed away in July surrounded by her family. Deborah received her BA in political science from Wittenberg and followed it with two master’s degrees (political science and education) and a PhD in educational evaluation and measurement from Kent State University. Her 1987 dissertation, “Predicting Success in an Honors Program: A Comparative Multiple and Ridge Regression,” was an early example of honors research. Her 1981 annotated bibliography of “The Honors Movement in the United States” in Forum for Honors and her subsequent …

Contents 2

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Call for Papers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Submission Guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dedication to Deborah Sell Craig. . . . . . …

Nontraditional Honors Students

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The National Collegiate Honors Council is an association of faculty, students, and others interested in honors education. Executive Committee: Rick Scott, President, University of Central Arkansas; Jim Ruebel, President-Elect, Ball State University; Gregory Lanier, Immediate Past-President, University of West Florida; Barry Falk, Vice-President, James Madison University; Kyoko Amano, Secretary, University of Indianapolis; Gary Bell, Treasurer, Texas Tech University. Executive Director: Cynthia M. Hill, headquartered at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Board of Directors: Suketu Bhavsar, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Lisa Coleman, Southeastern Oklahoma State University; Riley Cook, University of Iowa; Emily Jones, Oklahoma State University; Joe King, Radford University; Jon Kotinek, …

An Honors Koan: Selling Water By The River, Jeffrey A. Portnoy

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Since Jerry Herron begins his forum essay, “Notes toward an Excellent Marxist-Elitist Honors Admissions Policy,” with his anecdotal True Genealogical Confessions, I feel obligated to begin in a similar mode. One side of my family was in the real estate business in St. Louis, and the other operated on the production side of industry—garment manufacturing, in the schmatta business so to speak. Like Herron, I have benefitted from a familial confluence of disparate skill sets in my position as Director of the Georgia Perimeter College Honors Program, which during the recruiting and registration season I would liken to that of …

Where Are All The Gifted Black Girls? Giving High School Girls Voice Via Qualitative Research Approach And Black Feminist Theory, Mary L. Montie

Wayne State University Dissertations

ABSTRACT

WHERE ARE ALL THE GIFTED BLACK GIRLS?

GIVING HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS VOICE VIA QUALITATIVE RESEARCH APPROACH AND BLACK FEMINIST THEORY

by

MARY L. MONTIE

May 2013

Advisor: Dr. Karen L. Tonso

Major: Educational Evaluation and Research

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Gifted programs in the United States under-represent African American (Black) children (Phi Delta Kappan, 1992). In 1993, African-American students were under-represented by 50% in gifted education, and 60% in 1998 (Grantham & Ford, 2003). Further, some speculate that gifted education programs are the most segregated educational programs in the nation (Ford, 1995). This proves especially true for Black gifted …

Casting Minority Gifted Students: The Pedagogical Impact Of Cinema On The Culture Of Schooling, Deborah F. Burnette

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

African American students are significantly underrepresented in gifted education programs. This dissertation creates a space where gifted education, African American students, media literacy, and teacher perceptions intersect in the field of curriculum studies. Media literacy will be utilized to critique popular films by gifted endorsement teacher-students and myself. Due to the low number of states that require pre-service teachers to study gifted characteristics of children it is left up to gifted teacher endorsement programs to train teachers. By using media literacy to examine films in gifted teacher endorsement programs, I assert that the under-representation of African American students in the …

A Multi-Site Case Study Investigating Teacher Perspectives Of Standards Based Reform And Gifted Students, Amy Valadez

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The push by the Federal government to directly increase and positively impact achievement since the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) gave rise to the educational design known as standards based reform (SBR). This legislation impacted all sub-groups by measuring growth for sub-populations to determine yearly adequate progress. The growth of the sub-population of gifted students, however, was not included in the determination of a school's or county's success, so the impact of standards based reform on the gifted student is lacking. Therefore, this case study examined educators' perspectives of standards based reform on the gifted child in …

The Tutorial Education Program: An Honors Program For Brazilian Undergraduate Students, Denise De Fleith, Aderson Luiz Costa Jr., Eunice M.L Soriano De Alencar

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

The Tutorial Education Program is an honors program for Brazilian undergraduates, sponsored by the Ministry of Education. Based on philosophical principles of tutorial education in which small groups of academic talented students are guided by a tutor, the program is designed to support groups of undergraduates who demonstrate outstanding performance in their academic activities. The Tutorial Education Program provides enrichment activities in order to broaden the academic development of students with exceptional potential and abilities. Our purpose in this paper is to describe this honors program for undergraduates from different states in Brazil, focusing on the underlying philosophy of the …

Setting Them Free: Students As Co-Producers Of Honors Education, Bouke Van Gorp, Marca V.C. Wolfensberger, Nelleke De Jong

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

One of the factors that differentiate honors from regular teaching at the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, is the freedom that honors students enjoy, a freedom that evokes excellence because it is focused and targeted. This targeted freedom takes three different shapes in our honors program and comes with specific challenges for both students and teachers. While the attractions and advantages of such freedom are both theoretically and practically significant, our experience has also demonstrated drawbacks that need to be addressed and resolved in creating effective honors education.

Mission, Performance Indicators, And Assessment In U. S. Honors: A View From The Netherlands, Vladimir Bartelds, Lyndsay Drayer, Marca V.C. Wolfensberger

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Amission statement that identifies the goals and aims of an honors program is a key step in program development. The NCHC’s Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program states unequivocally that a successful honors program “has a clear mandate from the institution’s administration in the form of a mission statement or charter document that includes the objectives and responsibilities of honors and defines the place of honors in the administrative and academic structure of the institution.” According to Mrozinski, mission statements are public definitions of purpose published in a college‘s catalog, website, or other planning documents and are generally …

Self As Text: Adaptations Of Honors Practice In Switzerland, Michaela Ruppert Smith

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

City as Text™, the experiential learning program developed by the NCHC Honors Semesters Committee, has been adopted and adapted by hundreds if not thousands of educational institutions throughout the United States and beyond. Having served on the Honors Semesters Committee, I exported this learning strategy to Switzerland while teaching in an International Baccalaureate Program in Geneva. I adapted City as Text™ for multi-disciplinary college preparatory students in Europe, and that adaptation might now serve in turn as a model for experiential learning in honors programs and colleges in the United States and internationally. The focus and link between the City …

About The Authors

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Eunice Soriano de Alencar, PhD, is Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Brasília, Brazil. For the last forty years, she has published numerous books and articles, especially on giftedness and creativity. She is on the editorial board of several journals in Brazil and abroad and is an honorary member of the Brazilian Council for Giftedness.

Honors Education And Global Citizenship, Marca V.C. Wolfensberger

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

An issue of JNCHC devoted to “Honors Around the Globe” is an important opportunity to consider the role of honors in creating international awareness and understanding. Honors faculty and administrators have become increasingly active in global cross-communication through, for instance, international involvement in the NCHC and the recent conference on “Evoking Excellence in Higher Education and Beyond” in the Netherlands that attracted participants from numerous countries. As we become more familiar with honors in all its manifestation across the globe, now is a good time to consider the value we provide in preparing students to contribute to our changing world.

Journal Of National Collegiate Honors Council Dedication

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council Online Archive

Marca Wolfensberger has been active in honors education for the past two decades. She co-founded one of the first honors programs in the Netherlands in the early 1990s; ten years later she started connecting with individual members of the NCHC; and, after attending her first NCHC conference in Chicago in 2003, she has been a regular participant in annual honors conferences, bringing with her numerous colleagues—as many as thirty at just one conference—from the Netherlands. She has regularly published and presented on honors education both in the United States and in Europe, and this year she is an organizer of …