Honors education was never intended to be a virtual offering; it takes intimate, three-dimensional, communal, and intellectual interaction among faculty and students to tackle wicked problems. The COVID-19 crisis forced honors educators into an extreme reboot, extracting courses from comfortable working spaces and relocating them to strange new…

Climate change is complex, requiring critical thinking on both local and global scales. Its effects vary dramatically around the world and require new strategies to help students grasp its complexity, scale, and interrelatedness. This article describes a project to help biology students think critically about climate change from a global…

Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) uses advanced technology to provide customized learning and individualized feedback to foreign language students (Heift & Schulze, 2007). Some comprehensive ICALL programs claim the ability to take learners from no knowledge of a language to levels of advanced knowledge and comprehension.…

In this article, by way of an analysis of a case of mathematics teacher training, I explore the general idea of pedagogic expectation of an alignment of pedagogic identities and specific realisations of mathematics in pedagogic contexts. The particular case analysed has a constructivist orientation, but the analytic resources brought to bear in…

Much knowledge in chemistry exists at a molecular level, inaccessible to direct perception. Chemistry instruction should therefore include multiple visual representations, such as molecular models and symbols. This study describes the implementation and assessment of a learning unit designed for 12th grade chemistry honors students. The organic…

Radford University was recently configured with a campus-wide wireless local area network. Using these new capabilities, a classroom-based Honors section of Concepts of Biology was conducted solely using electronic technologies (paper was never transferred from professor to student). To accomplish this, students used common software and freeware.…

Two experiments explored the role of vicarious "self" explanations in facilitating student learning gains during computer-presented instruction. In Exp. 1, college students with low or high knowledge on Newton's laws were tested in four conditions: (a) monologue (M), (b) questions (Q), (c) explanation (E), and (d) question + explanation (Q + E).…

Questions about the suitability of cognitively-oriented instructional approaches for students of different academic levels are frequently raised by teachers and researchers. This study examined student participation in knowledge-building discourse in two implementations of a short inquiry unit focusing on environmental problems. Participants in…

The case-based computerized laboratory (CCL) is a chemistry learning environment that integrates computerized experiments with emphasis on scientific inquiry and comprehension of case studies. The research objective was to investigate chemical understanding and graphing skills of high school honors students via bidirectional visual and textual…

Discusses a database used by honors high school U.S. history students learning about the Spanish-American War. Reports that the students compiled the database. Includes some of the historical background of the war, questions for study, a database key, and a table showing U.S. senators' votes relating to the War. (SG)

Freshmen cadets in an enriched mediated honors course in General Physics achieved slightly less on a 40 common-item criteria test than cadets in a traditionally taught honors course in the same subject, although the mediated course included approximately 40 percent more content in the area of modern physics. In the enriched course, audiovisual…

The Educational Opportunity Fund Legal Studies program addresses the need to increase access to careers in law for minority and disadvantaged students. Through early identification of interest, recognition of problems, remediation, skills enhancement, and comprehensive legal career exploration and exposure, students in Montclair State College's…

The theme of this journal issue is "Institutional Renewal." Projects designed to address the issues of the 1980s at 18 colleges are described, and 15 definitions of institutional renewal are presented. Participating colleges were provided expert advice through the Association of American College's (AAC) Project Lodestar (renamed…

Seven essays are presented that deal with the students, instruction, and administration of Miami-Dade Community College (MDCC). First, John Losak considers the M-DCC student population since 1969, providing data on ethnicity, age of students, male/female enrollments, foreign student enrollments, program diversity, skill level of enrolling…

Nearly 100 conference papers from the George Mason University annual conference on nontraditional and interdisciplinary studies are presented. The are grouped into 14 categories: (1) assessment of prior learning, which includes "Lifelong Learning: Integrating the Liberal Arts and Experience in Adult General Education" (J. Gary Bernhard) and…