Since the 1980s, the Maryland Collegiate Honors Council has offered an annual conference on a host campus in late February. In 2020, MCHC slipped in the conference just before the apocalyptic arrival of COVID-19 in March. Because this conference is hugely popular statewide, we decided to organize it virtually in 2021. Our topic--"In…

This article considers the value of honors education beyond its marked contributions to enrollment management goals. Suggesting that quantitative assessments toward understanding the value of honors fail to capture its breadth, interdisciplinary focus, and engagement, authors posit a new way of measuring impacts from "contagion model"…

This article reviews the state of Canada's undergraduate research opportunities (UROs) in the life sciences across various institutions. Survey data gathered in 2019 from 20 departments in 14 universities show that all responding departments offer well-established forms of research that include credit-based directed studies or honors-thesis…

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…

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. Furthermore, the skills they need to become successful employees or graduate students are different from those required of…

Tracking and other practices of homogeneously grouping students by so-called ability level remain a norm in American classrooms, despite decades of research highlighting how they disserve and even harm student learning. Heterogeneous grouping, by contrast, benefits struggling learners, a conclusion supported by a substantial body of research. Some…

This article describes the strategies employed to make a university-wide commitment to student success, persistence, and graduation rates. The shift in culture has made student success everybody's business, and there has been a high level of buy-in to the enterprise. The predictive tools that have been developed have given focus to serving those…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

The fall 2014 entering honors class as Westminster College was drawn from the largest applicant pool in the program's almost three-decade history. Far from focusing on perks, 68% of these entering students claimed it was the interesting honors curriculum that caused them to submit an application. As for the larger applicant pool itself, the top…

What lecturers do and think are a prerequisite for educational change. It is therefore important to gain insight into factors that influence their involvement in educational reform. This study considers the effect of leadership and managerial constructs on lecturers' commitment to the newly implemented honours programmes in a Dutch University of…

Internationalization of honors programs and colleges enriches students' undergraduate education and expands their post-graduate options, opening doors to a new world of experiences and opportunities. This monograph takes a holistic approach to internationalization. The monograph highlights how honors programs and colleges have gone beyond…

As co-authors of this response to Annmarie Guzy's essay, these authors provide different vantage points on prior-credit programs that arise from their distinct roles on campus, and together they suggest the appropriate way forward for honors. To represent their unique perspectives and to mimic the ongoing back-and-forth on this topic on their…

The popularity of service learning has grown in recent years, as educators place more value on active and experiential forms of learning. Service learning is learning conducted through service work in a community setting in combination with coursework that frames the service experience with respect to civic engagement and political power. Yet…

In a world that no longer privileges thinking, Andrew Martino writes here that we might need to consider what we are asking of our students--and why--when we ask them to think. This article presents a declaration of how Martino thinks honors education can serve as a resistant force against the increasing encroachment of a wholly utilitarian…

In this design case, we describe our work to design and develop a socio-scientific issue (SSI) based unit of instruction for use in high school biology. Our team includes university based science educators, an experienced classroom teacher, and a microbiologist. The unit focuses on antibiotic resistant bacteria as a context for student exploration…