ERIC Number: EJ1080521
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013
Pages: 10
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1559-0143
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Teaching Research Methodologies to Professionally Oriented Honors Students
Levinson, Julie; Mandel, Richard
Honors in Practice, v9 p163-172 2013
The benefits of encouraging undergraduate students to pursue independent research have been well documented (Craney; Guterman; Hathaway et al.; Ishiyama; Kremer and Bringle; Volkwein and Carbone). Introducing students to research processes and protocols is always a challenge, particularly for students enrolled in professionally oriented, discipline-specific colleges: so called "specialty schools." In these colleges, preparing students to do high-level research is complicated by the nature and priorities of the students as well as by the particularities of the curriculum, which is invariably more restricted in scope than that of a conventional liberal arts college. Undergraduate specialty school students tend to be highly focused on preparing for their careers, and few plan to go on to research-oriented graduate programs. Nevertheless, specialty schools typically include many liberal arts requirements in their curricula in order to give students a well-rounded undergraduate education. The challenges for the faculty working with specialty school honors students include preparing them for substantive scholarly work in a discipline in which they possibly have had little grounding, fostering a scholarly subculture in colleges that are oriented more toward pre-professional training than scholarly pursuits, and efficiently introducing basic research methodologies and scholarly protocols to students working in a wide range of disciplines outside their area of specialization. Based on the authors' own stewardship of the honors program at Babson College, as well as on interviews with honors program directors at a variety of specialty colleges, they suggest some of the approaches and pitfalls of guiding students through honors research in areas outside of their immediate disciplinary focus.
Descriptors: Research Methodology, Courses, Honors Curriculum, Undergraduate Students, College Instruction, Professional Education, Student Research
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: Massachusetts
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A