Drawing upon my own experience as an educator, I describe and reflect upon my experiential learning-pedagogical process of transforming my Fall 2020 Zoom-based honors interpersonal communication course in which my students traversed through a series of experiential learning activities called Interpersonal Enrichment Journeys. Data revealed that…

What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among students who conceptualize both mindfulness and honors education as "doing more" (more exercises to gain psychological benefits and more work to gain higher GPAs), the authors of this paper piloted a new course in philosophy and religious studies.…

Africanisation of the curriculum has been proposed as an urgent and transformative imperative in South African education. Africanisation of the curriculum involves incorporating African perspectives, histories, cultures, and knowledge systems into the educational curriculum. It aims to recognise and value the contributions of African societies and…

Psychological grit has gained substantial interest among traditional higher education practitioners, with many seeking the link between grit, academic performance and retention. The literature pertaining to distance education cohorts is scant, however, especially within the South African context, which holds unique challenges for accessing and…

This case study explores undergraduate students' ideas about, behaviors regarding, experiences with, and application of information literacy (IL) concepts and how they apply these understandings in their own research processes. Students from an undergraduate Honors Thesis Preparation course completed a pre- and post-questionnaire in which they…

The National Collegiate Honors Council's "Shared Principles and Practices of Honors Education" (2022) outlines the level of commitment, pedagogical innovation and inclusivity, mentoring, and intellectual leadership that honors programs and colleges expect from their faculty. These high expectations require institutional support…

The Australian honours research degree plays an important role as a pre-requisite for direct entry into doctoral research programmes. The honours degree training is particularly important to health disciplines where there is a growing recognition of the importance of research training to embed evidence-based approaches to practice. This study…

This essay describes a student-designed framework implemented by an honors program because of budget constraints. The framework's implementation, involving structured student leadership, feedback integration, and curricular adaptations, is detailed along with an exploration of the positive consequences of implementing a student-designed approach…

The assumption that honors programs are more academically challenging is rarely interrogated. Using multi-institutional, longitudinal quantitative data from a larger study, we use quasi-experimental methods to examine students' experiences of course rigor, including workload and cognitive challenge, for honors participants compared to…

Teachers, as the primary human capital resource within a school, are the most significant lever in the educational success of students. High-quality teachers are necessary for the academic growth and development of all students at each level of rigor. At the high school level, courses are designated in two primary categories determined by the…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore how students develop cultural competency through participation in an experiential learning-embedded college course. Existing literature often addresses career readiness, student success, cultural competency, and faculty-student affairs collaboration as distinct areas of research. However,…

Honors faculty are defined by their dedication to their craft and their enormous impact on students in every discipline. However, their role within the larger university setting is nebulous, leading to an undervaluation of their contributions to higher education in an era of negative perceptions of the industry. Honors faculty can be tenured,…

This dissertation seeks to answer the following research question: what are the qualitatively different ways that students conceive of an antiracist professional identity for themselves after taking an undergraduate honors course with racism and antiracism as its central themes? To answer this research question, I employ critical race…

In his 1837 essay "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a challenge that is appropriate for honors practitioners today--namely, to figure out just how good a time this is to be doing the work we do. Honors students, faculty, and staff occupy every part of the institutions we call home, so we should take advantage of our…

The undergraduate honours-level dissertation is a significant component of many UK undergraduate programmes, as a key stage in the longer-term intellectual and career development of potential researchers and knowledge-workers, and also a critical contributor to immediate award outcome. This study aims to identify how dissertation supervisors…