Honors Tutorial Examples
Practical Suggestions for Honors Faculty
We’ve compiled some recommendations for how to find ways to integrate the Honors experience with your existing course. Since students enroll in combined course options and tutorials across all colleges at BGSU, our recommendations aren’t discipline-specific, but focus on our mission, characteristics, and learning outcomes.
The University Honors Program was established in 1978 and designated as an Honors College in 2013. The mission of the Bowling Green State University’s Honors College is to create a community of scholars through an emphasis on personal and intellectual development and preparation for global citizenship. Members of the Honors College will develop critical thinking skills, make interdisciplinary connections, conduct original scholarship, and have access to leadership and professional opportunities.
The National Collegiate Honors Council offers the following definition of honors education:
Honors education ignites passion for lifelong learning and encourages student creativity, collaboration, and leadership in the classroom and beyond. It is characterized by in-class and extracurricular activities that are measurably broader, deeper, or more complex than comparable learning experiences typically found at institutions of higher education. Honors curriculum serves as a laboratory for inventive and experiential education that can be implemented in the traditional classroom. Honors experiences include a distinctive learner-directed environment and philosophy, provide opportunities that are appropriately tailored to fit the institution's culture and mission, and frequently occur within a close community of students and faculty. (https://www.nchchonors.org/about-nchc)
All Honors courses should integrate the Honors College’s three identified learning outcomes into their course design. These outcomes are critical thinking, written and oral communication, and integrative thinking. The definitions that the Honors College has adopted for these learning outcomes are derived from outcomes developed by AAC&U. Combined courses in Honors should communicate these outcomes to students alongside any course-specific learning outcomes established by the instructor of record and include assignments that will help Honors students make progress in these areas. Inclusion of these outcomes also offers the Honors College an opportunity to measure the characteristics of an Honors education as described above by the NCHC.
As an ongoing project, the Honors College will solicit and make available assignments and teaching strategies that address the challenges of meeting expectations in a cross-listed Honors course. If you would like to submit strategies that have worked well for you in the past, please send them to Dean Simon Morgan-Russell at smorgan@bgsu.edu.
My Honors Tutorial assignment will be to write a paper using two theories-one we have discussed in class, and another I will find with guidance from my professor. In this paper, I will argue what theory I think is better to explain some educational psychology related outcome such as learning and/or behavior, motivation, etc., using support from the textbook and outside sources. This paper will satisfy the outcomes of Written Communication by creating an argumentative essay, Integrative Learning by applying various concepts and ideas to vital aspects of education, and Critical Thinking by evaluating psychological theories/arguments and their implications in the classroom.
I will prepare a manuscript ready for publication in a practitioner's journal in which I make arguments and conclusions related to forms of assessment and evaluation in education. This will meet the outcome of Critical Thinking, as it requires me to identify an argument and its assumptions, evaluate the evidence and logical construction, and respond with a conclusion.
I am a fine arts and biology major specializing in marine biology. A critical part of both fields is communicating, and the best way to convey ideas or concepts is through visuals. Through integrative learning, I hope to connect my science background with my artistic design to create accurate scientific illustrations of topics and species in ichthyology. I will need to find reference works as inspiration, so through this process, I will be introduced to scientific illustrations that span biology, chemistry, art, and more. This will be a holistic opportunity to grow as a person and as a student.
For the honors tutorial of PHYS 2020, I will be completing a special project for the class. This will test me on what I have learned in the class by challenging me to design an experiment myself on a particular subject within the field of Physics. In doing this, I will be required to exercise the learning outcome of Integrative Learning, as I will need to have a comprehensive understanding of the concepts within Physics and be able to establish connections between all of these concepts as I carry out this experiment. One cannot fully understand the concept of Gravity without knowing about the properties of Energy and Force, for example. Physics obviously bears great significance to how we understand the world today, thus I will also have the opportunity to showcase the practical significance of the results of my experiment to real-life.
Alternative Assignments
The Honors College is sensitive to issues of equity: neither faculty nor students should be required to perform work that goes beyond reasonable expectations for a fixed-credit undergraduate course. Although one response to balancing the dual populations of Honors and non-Honors students in the same section might be to require more assignments, more meeting times, or additional readings of the Honors students, Honors faculty have also found other ways of challenging their students with “broader, deeper, or more complex . . . learning experiences” that characterize Honors education.
Consider asking Honors students to replace an existing requirement with an alternative assignment that fulfills one or more of our learning outcomes. This might be a research assignment; a reflective essay rather than an examination; leadership of a class meeting or assignment; any experience that allows students to fulfill one of Honors’ learning outcomes within the context of your course.
Updated: 06/27/2022 11:47AM