A Meaningful and Useful Twofer: Enhancing Honors Students’ Research Experiences While Gathering Assessment Data

Engaging students in assessment practice benefits honors students, faculty, and administrators. Students gain meaningful research experience while honors programs receive data to help assess student learning and prepare for program review. A one-semester course, Program Evaluation Experiences, tasks students (n = 10) with collecting and analyzing data from peers and faculty and then articulating its value for their personal academic development. Qualitative and quantitative instruments and measures include an online survey (Qualtrics), personal interviews (Rev), and focus groups (rev, n = 30). Students complete various analyses of data using SPSS and NVivo. Results indicate that students’ active participation in applied research methods for program assessment benefits both student and program and, because anchored in student experience, helps to reveal data that might otherwise remain unexpressed. The author asserts that this type of hands-on learning provides honors students with a wide range of practical experience not offered in non-honors curricula. A short history of program assessment in honors is provided

Civil-Military Relations in the Mass Public: an Analysis of Interpersonal Civil-Military Ties in Metropolitan Detroit.

This research uses survey data collected in 1973 from a cross-sectional sample of Detroiters to address three questions. First, are civilians isolated from the military establishment, or is the boundary between the civilian and the military spheres a permeable one? Second, are informal civil-military linkage mechanisms r and omly distributed throughout the population, or are some groups especially likely to maintain ties that span the civil-military interface? Third, are the informal ties that bind citizens and soldiers conducive to the maintenance of civilian control of the military, or do informal civil-military bonds allow the military to imprint its possibly distinctive "gung ho" worldview on civilian society? We have found that civilians are not totally estranged from the military establishment. Twenty per cent of our sample are veterans. Many respondents are friendly with a former soldier and are acquainted with someone on active-duty. Few people, however, have many ties to the st and ing military, and attentiveness to military and foreign policy issues is not high. Civil-military ties are not representative ties. Males and the highly educated are more likely than females and the less well-educated, respectively, to have had first-h and contact with the military; they maintain more ties to current military personnel; and they are more attentive to military and foreign policy issues. Young people--the citizens most likely to be directly affected by military policy in the short-run--are not disadvantaged in terms of civil-military interpersonal or attitudinal activism. Low status groups are not, however, especially advantaged in this regard. Finally, we find little reason to question Janowitz's argument that civilian domination of the military is best assured when the military is firmly embedded within the fabric of civilian society. Veterans, respondents with many ties to present-day soldiers, and those with close ties to former military men are not distinctive in their foreign policy beliefs. Generally speaking, the Detroit population is supportive of Cold War activism and some forms of internationalism. Detroiters are critical, however, of some aspects of American foreign policy and are hesitant about militarism.Ph.D.SociologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159271/1/8304588.pd