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ERIC Number: EJ1080794
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2014
Pages: 16
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1559-0143
EISSN: N/A
Re-Envisioning the Honors Senior Project: Experience as Research
Gustafson, Kevin; Cureton, Zachary
Honors in Practice, v10 p55-70 2014
One of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Basic Characteristics of a Fully Developed Honors Program is that it creates opportunities for undergraduate research, opportunities that frequently culminate in a senior thesis or capstone project. This article describes how the University of Texas at Arlington Honors College integrated experiential learning in a research-based capstone project. The overall success of the clinically-based projects completed by nursing students at the University of Texas at Arlington was the impetus to develop three experiential honors capstone options that could be used across campus: (1) a community service learning placement; (2) a paid or unpaid professional internship; and (3) a semester- or year-long study abroad program. Each department decided which options might constitute honors for its students. Honors administrators provided department chairs with brief descriptions of the options, including basic learning outcomes, and where possible, gave presentations at department meetings. The goal was threefold: (1) to give departments a greater sense of ownership of their honors students; (2) to convey the desire of honors to be responsive to differences among various undergraduate programs; and (3) to encourage units to approve more experiential options if faculty were willing and able to serve as mentors for such work. Such learning can help students "develop a sense of agency" and explore intersections of their biography with that of the world. This article describes one student's honors senior research project that serves as an example of an experiential capstone research project that defined a disciplinary problem, presented a survey of scholarship on the topic, and then explored the problem in methodologically innovative ways.
National Collegiate Honors Council. 1100 Neihardt Residence Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 540 North 16th Street, Lincoln, NE 68588. Tel: 402-472-9150; Fax: 402-472-9152; e-mail: nchc@unl.edu; Web site: http://nchchonors.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Russia; Texas
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A