INTRODUCTION - Honors Seminar

The Honors Seminar

Goals and Rational

The center piece of the Davis Honors Challenge is an array of four unit collaborative , multi-disciplinary seminars on complex contemporary problems. The primary goals of the seminars are to foster critical thinking skills and analytic interpretation, improve oral and written communication skills, enhance research skills, provide experience with group dynamics and collaborative problem solving, and develop familiarity with electronic communication skills. To accomplish these goals, 20 first and second-year students in each seminar work in teams on such topics as ethics of cloning, the role of virtual universities, human cloning, and experimentation with human embryos.

Each seminar is guided by a faculty member who does not lecture, but serves as facilitator. Faculty members are interested in but are not experts on the topic of the seminar, which makes the course a learning experience for the faculty member as well as the students. The faculty's primary responsibility is to keep the students on track by making sure they are finding good information,they are engaged in meaningful anlysis and critical thinking, that they are functioning effectively in teams, and are improving their oral and written comunication skills.

The seminars are an attempt to address the criticism of universities from business and professional community that students are not being trained as flexible learners who can function in the non-competitive, team-oriented environment of the modern workplace. Consequently, the seminars contain many elements that model the modern work environment, but these elements are placed in an academic context. The DHC has also fostered closer ties with the business and professional community by drawing on it for advise and expertise in the development of the program.

The seminars are offered only winter and spring quarters. The advantage of not offering the seminars in the fall is students can use fall quarter to develop their research and electronic communication skills. It also allows faculty time to gain the perspective they need to lead an honors seminar during faculty workshops offered fall quarter.

Methods

To deal with the complex problem students divide into teams, each team gathers information about a different facet of the problem. The teams gather information using the World Wide Web, personal interviews, and traditional and non-traditional library resources. Each team then analyzes and interprets its information and reports back orally and in writing to other students in the seminar.Because the development of good communication skills is a primary objective of the honors seminar the reports are critiqued by both faculty and other seminar students.

The oral and written reports serve as the basis for the deliberation that lead to the identification of the possible recommendations or solutions. In some seminars, the same teams collaborate to develop position papers. In other seminars, new teams are formed to distribute the expertise acquired during the initial information-gathering phase. These new teams then collaborate to develop position papers. In either case, the position papers are then the basis for the final set of discussions about the problem and which solution or combination of solutions is best. The final solution is presented to the entire DHC community during a convocation at the end of the quarter.

Approaches to Learning

Honors seminars are built upon the premise that students learn best when they are actively involved in their learning. One approach to making learning active is to involve students using collaborative learning groups. There is substantial evidence to support the claim that collaborative learning is a very successful approach to making learning active and student centered.

Honors seminars also utilize the theories developed by Patricia King and Karen Kitchener in their book Developing Reflective Judgment, to develop students abilities to think critically and reflectively about complex problems.

The honors seminars attract students with diverse learning styles and ways of knowing because they take advantage of alternative assessment techniques. Students are evaluated in authentic situations where students have the freedom to develop presentations or written papers that best display their abilities.