Teaching Honors Contract Courses

From L to R, Dr. Abraham Tucker (BIOL), Dr. Deborah Wilson (PSYC), and Dr. Paul Babbitt (PSCI)

The SAU Academy hosted a session today entitled: Teaching Honors Contract Courses. The session was designed to answer faculty questions about how to teach honors students who are in the same classroom at the same time as regular students. Most of SAU Honor Colleges' honors courses are of the contract variety.

Dr. Kardas, Honors College Director, opened the session by briefly describing honors education and honors colleges. After, he differentiated between full honors classes (all honors students, smaller class size, and taught differently) from contract honors classes.

Most of the Honors College's classes are of the contract variety. Students contract with their instructors to elevate a regular class to honors level. Today's speakers have all taught a number of contract honors classes and agreed to talk about their methods, successes, and problems.

Dr. Paul Babbitt led off and spoke mostly about his course PHIL 2403, Introduction to Philosophy. He noted that when he first taught that class as honors he did so as a full honors class. But, as demand for that class grew his department quit offering it as honors. So, Babbitt began to teach the class as a contract honors class.

Before describing his teaching, Babbitt said he found most honors students in his experience were "wannabe good students" and "risk averse." Kardas agreed and added that such descriptors were often repeated at honors meetings. Babbitt went on saying that he had a predilection for group projects and made honors students work together. To alleviate some of their anxiety, he made those projects pass-fail. Early attempts were less successful than later ones, he stressed, because he assumed students would communicate with each other more. One example, he said, was when two groups were supposed to debate, but both chose the same side. But, they learned from that mistake.






Babbitt ended by talking about how he taught upper-level honors contract courses. There, he said he simply assigned them research papers that were graded in the usual fashion.

The next speaker was Dr. Deborah Wilson. She spoke about her experiences in teaching statistics as an honors contract course. Her first experience antedated SAU's Title IX efforts (Wilson now serves on the Title IX Committee). She needed data about how other Arkansas colleges and universities were dealing with Title IX issues. So, she assigned that to her honors students as a group project. She was extremely gratified because those students later submitted their results to the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) meeting in Boston and their work was accepted. In Boston, they led a student panel discussing their research and its results. Wilson was also happy because not only did the students get to present they also got to travel. Some, for instance had never left Arkansas before, others had never been on a plane.

Since then, Wilson has continued to offer contract honors credit in statistics. She has also offered such credit for research methods, domestic violence, and psychological measurement courses. In the former, a student conducted original research related to Title IX issues. He will present those results in Seattle this October at the NCHC meeting. This past summer, Wilson taught an online course in domestic violence and had an honors student contract for it. There, Wilson had the student create a brochure designed to highlight Title IX resources available on campus and in the community. Wilson's psychological measurement class honors contract involved four students. Each student self administered a battery of psychological tests and then developed a personal personality profile.

Last, Dr. Abraham Tucker spoke on how he used 23 and Me genetic tests for honors students in his genetics class the last three years. Unfortunately, the cost of those tests has doubled leading him to now purchase 23 and Me and cheaper Ancestry. com tests. The cost for those tests has, in some years, exceeded $1,000. Fortunately, those costs have been borne by the Honors College and the College of Science and Engineering, thanks to the generosity of the dean, Dr. Scott McKay.

The honors students in the genetics class get the test kits, use them, and return them to the company for the results. A few weeks later, those results come back to them online. Tucker stated that once he hands the students their kits they, and their associated data, are the student's property. They may share, or not share the data as they wish.

At the end of the semester, the honors students in the genetics class make presentations and write papers of human genomics using they data they received. They are free to reveal as much as they are comfortable. All students have an option to not test themselves (for obvious ethical reasons) and to look at random unknown data instead. Interestingly, no student thus far has chosen that option.

At the end, the audience asked questions. Two faculty in the audience, Dr. Juping Wang and Dr. Svetlana Paulson shared their experiences teaching full honors courses in Spanish and World History, respectively. Dr. Natalia Murphy also spoke of her experiences with honors students in her geography contract honors classes.