What Makes a Curriculum Significant? Tracing the Taxonomy of Significant Learning in Jesuit Honors Programs

Over the last few years, I have sat in the opening sessions of the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) conference and felt equal parts concern and conviction. In 2015 and 2016, opening speakers enumerated the challenges and opportunities that confront honors educators in a rapidly changing higher education landscape. I sympathized with their concerns in an institutional and cultural context marked by what Schwehn called the “Weberian ethos” of education—an instrumental, and less charitable, attitude toward academic inquiry. Yet, even as I acknowledged the veracity of their arguments, I was buoyed by belief in the Jesuit mission that animates my institution, particularly its emphases on social justice and care for the whole person. When NCHC leadership revealed the “just” honors theme for the 2017 conference, I felt affirmed in my optimism about the future of honors education. This optimism occasioned my inquiry here on the curricular design and academic practices of Jesuit honors programs. As a way of tying this curricular review to recent trends in pedagogy and the wider literature on the science of teaching and learning, I used Dee Fink’s significant learning taxonomy as a heuristic device to examine eight honors programs at Jesuit institutions. Fink, whose work has gained widespread appeal in teaching circles over the last fifteen years, promotes dynamic and student-centered pedagogy that leads to substantive and enduring learning outcomes. Many of the tenets Fink emphasizes in his model reflect honors pedagogy as defined by the NCHC and various educators and administrators within the honors community. One might thus expect honors programs to reflect significant learning principles in their curricula. Jesuit honors programs, however, are marked not only by their adherence to principles of honors education but also by what the Honors Consortium of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) calls “essential characteristics of a Jesuit Honors Program.” These characteristics include integrative learning, reflection and discernment, and commitment to social justice in the spirit of the “intellectual apostolate” (Honors Consortium, n.d.). Recent work by Kraus, Wildes and Yavneh Klos, and Yavneh Klos et al. makes important connections between these Jesuit ideals and the larger honors community, where reflective learning and service to society often thrive in non-Jesuit contexts. I follow their lead here by suggesting a Jesuit-inspired curricular paradigm but one that is ultimately applicable to all programs interested in promoting a just curricular model for the twenty-first century

Intercultural Conversations: Honors-Led Partnerships to Engage International Students on Campus

At a time when many universities are interested both in enrollment growth and the prestige of academic selectivity, international student recruitment and honors education emerge as popular strategic initiatives on college campuses. An influx of international students can enhance campus culture, fill enrollment gaps, and increase tuition revenue. Meanwhile, a selective undergraduate honors community serves as an exemplar of scholarship and distinction, which may attract academically talented students to the institution. On the surface, these trends appear unrelated. Lee notes, however, that international students are often motivated by institutional prestige and reputation when deciding to study in the United States (317), which suggests the seemingly parallel conversations on international student recruitment and honors education may intersect after all. This chapter details potential points of intersection to demonstrate ways in which honors programs and colleges can engage international students at home in sustainable and culturally sensitive ways. In the second half of the chapter, I highlight Saint Louis University’s (SLU) International Partnership Program, which emphasizes sustained conversations between honors and international students as part of a credit-bearing opportunity within the SLU Honors Program. I situate the program in the context of other honors internationalization efforts, discuss the challenges and opportunities this program presents, and provide data from inchoate efforts to assess the program’s effects on students’ intercultural competence and sense of global citizenship

Purpose, Meaning, and Exploring Vocation in Honors Education

This paper examines the importance of cultivating a sense of vocation in honors education. Through examples of coursework, program initiatives, and advising strategies, authors from across five institutions align the scholarship of vocation with best practices and principles in contemporary honors discourse, defining vocation in the context of higher education and describing how this concept works within honors curricula to enrich student experience and cultivate individual understandings of purpose. By focusing on critical reflection processes, Ignatian pedagogy, and theories of moral development and reasoning, the authors offer different models to advance the thesis that honors educators can and should address personal fulfillment in addition to intellectual talent, and they posit vocational exploration and discernment as tools for extending and deepening their students’ personal sense of meaning in local and global communities

Influence of pore architecture and chemical structure on the sodium storage in nitrogen-doped hard carbons

Hard carbon is the material of choice for sodium ion battery anodes. Capacities comparable to those of lithium/graphite can be reached, but the understanding of the underlying sodium storage mechanisms remains fragmentary. A two-step process is commonly observed, where sodium first adsorbs to polar sites of the carbon (“sloping region”) and subsequently fills small voids in the material (“plateau region”). To study the impact of nitrogen functionalities and pore geometry on sodium storage, a systematic series of nitrogen-doped hard carbons is synthesized. The nitrogen content is found to contribute to sloping capacity by binding sodium ions at edges and defects, whereas higher plateau capacities are found for materials with less nitrogen content and more extensive graphene layers, suggesting the formation of 2D sodium structures stabilized by graphene-like pore walls. In fact, up to 84% of the plateau capacity is measured at potentials less than 0 V versus metallic Na, that is, quasimetallic sodium can be stabilized in such structure motifs. Finally, gas physisorption measurements are related to charge–discharge data to identify the energy storage relevant pore architectures. Interestingly, these are pores inaccessible to probe gases and electrolytes, suggesting a new view on such “closed pores” required for efficient sodium storage

Archiving Software Surrogates on the Web for Future Reference

Software has long been established as an essential aspect of the scientific process in mathematics and other disciplines. However, reliably referencing software in scientific publications is still challenging for various reasons. A crucial factor is that software dynamics with temporal versions or states are difficult to capture over time. We propose to archive and reference surrogates instead, which can be found on the Web and reflect the actual software to a remarkable extent. Our study shows that about a half of the webpages of software are already archived with almost all of them including some kind of documentation.Comment: TPDL 2016, Hannover, German

Mechanistic insights into the reversible lithium storage in an open porous carbon via metal cluster formation in all solid-state batteries

Porous carbons are promising anode materials for next generation lithium batteries due to their large lithium storage capacities. However, their high voltage slope during lithiation and delithiation as well as capacity fading due to intense formation of solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) limit their gravimetric and volumetric energy densities. Herein we compare a microporous carbide-derived carbon material (MPC) as promising future anode for all solid-state batteries with a commercial high-performance hard carbon anode. The MPC obtains high and reversible lithiation capacities of 1000 mAh g−1carbon in half-cells exhibiting an extended plateau region near 0 V vs. Li/Li+ preferable for full-cell application. The well-defined micro porosity of the MPC with a specific surface area of >1500 m2 g−1 combines well with the argyrodite-type electrolyte (Li6PS5Cl) suppressing extensive SEI formation to deliver high coulombic efficiencies. Preliminary full-cell measurements vs. nickel-rich NMC-cathodes (LiNi0.9Co0.05Mn0.05O2) provide a considerably improved average potential of 3.76 V leading to a projected energy density as high as 449 Wh kg−1 and reversible cycling for more than 60 cycles. 7Li Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy was combined with ex-situ Small Angle X-ray Scattering to elucidate the storage mechanism of lithium inside the carbon matrix. The formation of extended quasi-metallic lithium clusters after electrochemical lithiation was revealed

Knowledge based improvement:simulation and artificial intelligence for identifying and improving human decision-making in an operations systems

The performance of most operations systems is significantly affected by the interaction of human decision-makers. A methodology, based on the use of visual interactive simulation (VIS) and artificial intelligence (AI), is described that aims to identify and improve human decision-making in operations systems. The methodology, known as 'knowledge-based improvement' (KBI), elicits knowledge from a decision-maker via a VIS and then uses AI methods to represent decision-making. By linking the VIS and AI representation, it is possible to predict the performance of the operations system under different decision-making strategies and to search for improved strategies. The KBI methodology is applied to the decision-making surrounding unplanned maintenance operations at a Ford Motor Company engine assembly plant

Refinement of the GINGF3 locus for hereditary gingival fibromatosis

Hereditary gingival fibromatosis (HGF) is a rare, clinically variable disorder characterized by slowly progressive fibrous overgrowth of the gingiva. Four gene loci have been mapped for autosomal dominant non-syndromic HGF (adHGF). The molecular basis of adHGF remains largely unknown, with only a single SOS1 gene mutation identified so far at the gingival fibromatosis 1 (GINGF1) locus in one family. We identified an adHGF family with ten affected individuals in whom onset of gingival fibromatosis concurred with the eruption of the primary teeth. In order to identify the molecular basis in this family, we tested for linkage of the disease to known adHGF loci. A maximal multipoint logarithm of the odds score of 3.91 was obtained with marker D2S390 (θ = 0) at the GINGF3 locus on chromosome 2p23.3–p22.3, and linkage to other known loci was excluded. Sequencing two candidate genes, ALK and C2orf18, and a single nucleotide polymorphisms array analysis did not reveal a mutation or copy number variation in a patient from the family. We refined the GINGF3 locus to a 6.56-cM, 8.27-Mb region containing 112 known and hypothetical genes, and our data and a search of the literature suggest that GINGF3 is a major adHGF locus