Honors College Faculty Support for High-Impact Practice Participation

Much of the existing research on honors colleges or programs is focused on the student experience, with less information offered concerning the faculty perspective. This study presents findings from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), comparing support for high-impact practices between faculty who teach honors courses and those who do not. Along with core FSSE items, this study uses responses from 1,487 faculty members at 15 institutions on two experimental items about teaching honors courses. A series of ordinary least squares and binary logistic regression analyses suggest that faculty who teach honors courses are more likely to supervise undergraduates on research and internships and to think that it is important for students to participate in learning communities, study abroad, and research with faculty. These findings are interpreted within the context of previous research and current theory, bridging knowledge from the fields of higher education and gifted education.

Hearts and Minds: Honors Programs in North American Christian Institutions

For readers of this journal outside North America, the very concept of “honors education” may be confusing (since the word honours features in British and Commonwealth degree titles) or obscure (bringing to mind associations with aristocratic privilege or elitist competition). But in the United States the development of honors programs in colleges, and later honors colleges within universities, has been an important and growing trend of the last fifty years. Intended to recruit students of high intellectual aptitude, to serve their special needs, and to raise the academic profile of the host institution, honors programs have proliferated from a handful in the 1940s to more than 600, as catalogued in the most recent edition of Peterson's Guide to Honors Programs and Colleges (Digby, 2005). Even though the phrase “honors education” may have a peculiarly North American ring, the issues raised for those who teach highly talented university students are the same for Christian educators around the world, and very little has been published on the topic. With these essays we aim to identify some of the issues that are particularly relevant to Christian higher education for “honors” students, to explore how different theological traditions offer different pedagogical resources for teaching the gifted, and to describe some successful paradigms for cultivating hearts and minds toward service in the kingdom of God.