In a bid to make high school fruitful and engaging for every student, the Indiana State Board of Education in December 2024 approved a single new diploma that will be effective for all seniors in the 2028-29 school year. The diploma doubles elective credits to 12 to allow more flexibility for students to tailor their learning to their goals. They…

Citizenship and related values are common elements in the missions of honors programs. Our goal was to design a junior honors seminar with an intentional focus on developing citizenship, civic identity, and civic virtues through engagement with the challenging history of our city, Montgomery, Alabama. The course employed four evidence-based…

This essay presents the creation process for an online honors course in the field of business. Highlighting engagement, critical thinking, and inclusivity as central themes, the author describes the course's inception, structure, outcomes, and post-teaching reflection. The pedagogical framework includes integrative current event assignments and…

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…

In today's post-pandemic world, a sense of belonging within and in the larger relational world is something that many people struggle with, particularly those individuals leaving home to enter college. Socially engaged mindfulness can connect individuals with their breath, thoughts, emotions, and one another to promote and support well-being. This…

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,…