The title of my address is “Determining the Significance of Honors.” That’s a hefty title. This summer I was reading the “numbers” issue of the JNCHC and thinking about how we measure impact and effects related to honors education when Hallie Savage asked me what the title of my presidential address would be. Given my academic discipline and my current thoughts about assessment centered on that JNCHC issue, I thought that the title Determining the Significance of Honors would be illustrative of my interests and focus

Bruce, Katherine

English

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Honors in Practice -- Online Archive National Collegiate Honors Council 2008 Determining the Significance of Honors Katherine Bruce University of North Carolina - Wilmington, bruce@uncw.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nchchip  Part of the Higher Education Administration Commons Bruce, Katherine, "Determining the Significance of Honors" (2008). Honors in Practice -- Online Archive. 82. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nchchip/82 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the National Collegiate Honors Council at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors in Practice -- Online Archive by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 17KATHERINE E. BRUCEDetermining the Significance of HonorsKATHERINE E. BRUCEUNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA WILMINGTON(What follows is a somewhat revised version of the presidentialaddress that Kate Bruce delivered on November 3, 2007, at the annu-al NCHC conference in Denver, Colorado.)The title of my address is “Determining the Significance of Honors.” That’s ahefty title. This summer I was reading the “numbers” issue of the JNCHCand thinking about how we measure impact and effects related to honors edu-cation when Hallie Savage asked me what the title of my presidential addresswould be. Given my academic discipline and my current thoughts aboutassessment centered on that JNCHC issue, I thought that the title Determiningthe Significance of Honors would be illustrative of my interests and focus.I don’t presume for a minute to have a complete answer to this question, butI do have some thoughts I want to share with you about what appear to be someof the critical elements of significance and how they may apply to honors.To do this, I would like to tell you a bit about what I study. We all come tohonors with unique interests, experiences, skills and talents—especially thoserelated to our own academic disciplines. Our academic interests shape who weare, and in almost all cases our academic interests are the reasons that we arein honors in the first place; we are teachers of honors classes in chemistry or lit-erature, for example, or we are students enrolled in honors classes or partici-pating in independent scholarship in those disciplines.By academic training, I am a psychologist; no, not one of those psycholo-gists, but an experimental psychologist. Experimental psychologists studybehavior, as all psychologists do, and focus on conducting research to gatherdata to understand causes of behavior. Personally, I have studied mostly non-human animal behavior—social interactions and mate choice—in rodents, pri-mates, and fish, but more recently I have turned to researching the effects ofevolutionary constraints on non-human animal cognition.While this may not be your area of academic interest, it is a subject closeto many people’s hearts. You may have wondered about how your old doglearns new tricks; you may have even wondered if your pet thinks the same wayyou do. You may recall one of our former NCHC speakers, Sally Boysen fromOhio State, who gave a plenary address on this general topic. This pastSeptember, you probably heard that Alex the famous African gray parrot died at200818DETERMINING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HONORSthe age of thirty-one. His obituary was in the New York Times, no less!Although I don’t have a famous parrot named Alex, I do have rats with namessuch as J6 and I24. Even though they have not been featured in the New YorkTimes, they do have a spot on YouTube.What my students, my colleague Mark Galizio, and I study with these ratsis whether they show us with their behavior that they can form associations andconcepts. Much like the research with Alex the parrot, we are finding that evenrats seem to be able to show us complex learning, and we are testing to see howfar this goes. Does their behavior show us that they can form abstractions?Experiments such as those conducted in my lab and the ones with Alex are crit-ical because the ability to form complex abstractions can lead to the use ofsymbols and is vital for language. The combination of symbol use and languageis thought to be the hallmark of what is unique about human animals.In our lab, we are finding that rats show some types of concept learning,but only if we know how to ask them what they know. We ask them to demon-strate what they know with odor detection using common household spices,which is an innovative approach since most previous work on concept learn-ing in non-humans has used visual cues; after all, since that’s what humans usu-ally use, it seemed the way to go.For example, Alex the parrot demonstrated counting, shape and colorrecognition, and an understanding of what objects are made of. He could evenexplain associations between objects. For example, if presented with four blueobjects all of different shapes and asked “what’s the same?” he could answer“color.” But Irene Pepperberg, his trainer, found that he needed to touch ormouth the objects before he could vocalize the answer to a problem; that waspart of the learning process.Animal behaviorist Robert Bolles described this phenomenon when henoted that animals are “prepared”—biologically, instinctively—to be able tolearn certain associations and that, if we allow them to show us what they knowin a “prepared” environment, we will see a depth to their learning. For exam-ple, having Alex the parrot “say” an answer related to visual cues is a preparedresponse but asking my rat I24 to “say” or even “squeak” a response is not aprepared behavior. In fact, Bolles would say that I24 is contra-prepared to dothis. A rat squeaks when in danger or running away! This behavior would becontrary to our experimental setup; typically we ask the rat to make a responseto obtain a preferred food reward, a little sugar pellet, based on his recognitionof a spicy smell; we don’t want him to vocalize and run away. To learn aboutbehavior that leads to a treat, rats are prepared to do something like “dig” (notsqueak), so that’s what we ask the rats to do. They dig in scented sand, and weask them to learn about odors, not visual cues. Odors are to rats what colorsand shapes are to parrots and humans. These are examples of evolutionary con-straints.Back to significance. Most psychologists and, I assume, those of you whoknow about him think that Alex the parrot was remarkable. Many people wentHONORS IN PRACTICE19KATHERINE E. BRUCEso far as to attribute human emotions to the words that Irene Pepperberg taughtAlex. That “I love you” was one of Alex’s last phrases to his trainer was men-tioned in his NYT obituary. Maybe Alex meant “I love you” the same way youmean it when you say it to a parent or friend, but maybe not. That is hard to test.Yet, Alex and even I24 are remarkable. What they show us is significant.“Significant” is a term we use in special ways in psychology, one that has amyriad of meanings. In psychology, as in many of your disciplines, when weset up an experiment, we have a hypothesis about what the results will be. Wecollect data and use statistics to help us determine whether the results we findin our study are significant. In this statistical sense, “significant” means thatwhat was observed was unlikely to have just happened by chance and that, ifwe repeated our study, we’d be likely to find the same results, not some otherrandom answer.Significant—not random, not by chance, but something unique. Somethingthat is different from the norm. And that is part of the significance of honors:that honors education looks different from other types of education.There is another level to significance, though. Sometimes we find statisti-cally significant results—that is, we are confident that the results did not occurby chance—but also need to ask whether the results are theoretically signifi-cant. Do they mean anything? Do they make a difference? Are they importantwith a capital “I”?Back to Alex the parrot. Why is what Alex was capable of learning and“telling” us significant? Why do we find it Important?One answer is that we did not think it possible that a non-human couldshow this level of problem solving, that the kind of learning Alex showed issomething we thought only humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, could do.We learned something we did not expect. But, in fact, symbolic commu-nication has now been demonstrated in several species beside humans: byAlex; by Koko the gorilla, who uses sign language to communicate and showsome abstract concepts; by several chimps, such as the famous Washoe, whowas taught sign language back in the 1960s to communicate as well (Washoedied four days ago, and her obituary also made the NYT this past week) andalso Lana, Austin, and Sherman, chimps who use a computer to answer ques-tions about what they’ve learned; by Rocky, the sea-lion who appears to be ableto learn to categorize new symbols and organize them into groups that we label“numbers” and “letters”; and maybe even by I24, who behaves as if he canunderstand abstract concepts like “sameness.”All these results were unexpected. They remain controversial. They areexciting. They push our comfort zone.They are significant, something that we know does not happen by chance,something that is Important.Again, how can we relate this to honors? I would argue that some of thesevery features are what we define as significant or meaningful about honors.We find that an honors experience can change us in ways that we did notanticipate and the effect feels meaningful. Honors classes and independent200820scholarship push us to test limits and to stretch our selves creatively and to learnhow to ask the right questions, whether we are teachers or students. Honorspushes our comfort zones, and that is certainly not by chance; that’s exactlywhat honors pedagogy is about.Part of the significance of honors is that we look for ways to stretch ourboundaries. Honors challenges us to learn in unexpected places, to learn inunexpected ways. My comments echo those made by our plenary speaker EllenWinner yesterday, and they reflect what City as TextTM is about and what Partnersin the Parks is about. Honors challenges us to find the significance in thoseexperiences, to see connections we never thought of, to be open to new ideas.And that relates to one other hallmark of what we value about honors edu-cation, which is interdisciplinary learning. I think we sometimes forget thatwhen we come to the annual conference, we all bring our disciplinary per-spectives. These perspectives about the topics we love to study can bring freshinsights when we discuss ideas with one another. All around us, we have aremarkable group of individuals—students of physics, math, psychology, liter-ature, geology, business, biology, education, the arts, just to name a few. Whenwe speak to each other about—and from the perspectives of—our academicdisciplines, we are open to the fresh ideas and connections all around us.Unexpected, unanticipated, interdisciplinary: these features, once we havehomed in on how to ask a question correctly, help us determine the significanceof honors._____________________________The author may be contacted at bruce@uncw.edu.HONORS IN PRACTICEDETERMINING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HONORS

Determining the Significance of Honors

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=nchchip

Determining the Significance of Honors

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska