One of the factors that differentiate honors from regular teaching at the Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, is the freedom that honors students enjoy, a freedom that evokes excellence because it is focused and targeted. This targeted freedom takes three different shapes in our honors program and comes with specific challenges for both students and teachers. While the attractions and advantages of such freedom are both theoretically and practically significant, our experience has also demonstrated drawbacks that need to be addressed and resolved in creating effective honors education.The challenges and struggles as well as the rewards that we have experienced might be familiar to honors educators around the world, but they are also shaped by the particular contexts of our program within the Faculty of Geosciences, within Utrecht University, and within the Netherlands, contexts that we will now introduce.
Students differ in their learning preferences. When students are more intrinsically motivated this improves their well-being and involvement (Levesque, Zuehlke, Stanek, & Ryan, 2004). Teaching highly motivated honors students places different demands on teachers (Wolfensberger, 2012). High motivated students prefer teachers who offer them autonomy and who supports their need for autonomy by offering structure by an autonomy supportive teaching strategy (Reeve, 2009; Vansteenkiste et al., 2012) . Honors teachers indicate that they struggle with finding the right balance between providing autonomy and structure, which is different for every student. In our research we focus on how higher education teachers tailor their teaching strategies towards the perceived learning preferences regarding autonomy and structure of both honors and regular students. We conducted semi-structured interviews with help of a topic list with 16 teachers of 4 institutions and used a grounded theory approach to analysize the data. Because the subjects in this study teach both in honors and regular educational programmes, we gained insights in the underlying beliefs about and strategies used in these two different contexts. In this talk we share our findings and explore how the results can be used in daily practice.
Paper presentatie tijdens de EARLI Conference 2015, Limassol, Cypres, 28 augustus. In this line of research we take a social psychological approach to understanding how honors students position themselves when collaborating with regular students. More specifically, we explore whether stereotypes about honors students as well as inclusion goals affect the extent to which honors students adapt to group norms in terms of ambition, motivation and excellence or take a more leading role when working with regular students. Results of a small more qualitative pilot study (N = 14) show that honors students indeed tend to behave differently by either adapting to the group of regular students or by taking the lead/control. Further the main reasons provided for this are preventing disharmony and delivering high quality work. Results of a larger survey study show that honors students (N = 106) are more likely to take a leading role when they feel valued by the group in terms of competence and inclusion. Further, regular students’ (N = 729) attitude to such a role is particularly negative when they do not want to include honors students and sense that honors students do not want to be included. Results are discussed in terms of its effects on creating a culture of excellence via honors programs within higher education and provide insights in how to improve the interaction between honors and regular students.
