Affiliated Research Projects

“Assessing Students’ Undergraduate Research Experience”

Researchers: Dr. Chaonan Liu and Jordan Meyer

Undergraduate research and creative projects are key among the high impact practices utilized by honors colleges and programs, with most of these programs having a formal requirement to complete such projects (Anderson, Lyons, & Weiner, 2014). Honors students at research universities are nearly twice as likely as their non-honors peers to engage in research or creative endeavors (Cognard-Black & Spisak, 2019) and these experiences are featured as a core mode of learning in the National Collegiate Honors Council’s definition of honors education (NCHC Board of Directors, 2013). However, while there is much literature regarding the benefits and practice of these experiences, most is discipline-specific and therefore is outside the scope of honors programs and colleges that aim to provide students with a unique interdisciplinary experience.

Our project aims to understand students’ undergraduate research experiences in the form of scholarly projects at the Purdue John Martinson Honors College (JMHC). There are two main project objectives. First, we aim to assess the effectiveness of undergraduate research and creative endeavors at the JMHC. We wish to analyze student submissions for the scholarly project requirement in the past three years (from 2019-2022) to gauge how well the scholarly projects met our established learning objectives (see Appendix). By doing so, we hope to inform students, scholars, and educators at JMHC, as well as in other honors programs and colleges, and interdisciplinary communities of potential challenges for both students and educators in meeting the learning and research goals. We also want to offer a reflection on the role of these scholarly projects in meeting the overall goals of interdisciplinary programs.

Second, we aim to assess the scholarly project formation process, asking how interdisciplinary students navigate the process of becoming involved in undergraduate research and creative projects that often cross traditional boundaries. As with our assessment of students’ scholarly projects and learning objectives, we hope to inform similar programs of students’ interdisciplinary project formation process with a particular emphasis on which approaches appear to be drawing students into research and creative endeavors and how students perceive the crucial beginning stages of the research process.

“Movable Desks, Flexible Minds? The Archaeology of Honors Active Learning Classrooms”

Researchers: Dr. Elizabeth Brite and Dr. Katie Jarriel

Active learning pedagogies emphasize changes in the spatial ontologies of the classroom to achieve better learning outcomes. As a key discipline in the study of human material culture, archaeology is well-suited to document and evaluate the social, cultural, and cognitive impacts of human-occupied spaces. In this study, we apply methods of archaeological practice to evaluate the impacts of a major project of classroom redesign in an Honors College setting. The establishment of active learning classroom spaces within a new, $90 million living-learning community for Purdue University’s John Martinson Honors College provided an ideal context to evaluate how inhabitants (students, faculty, and staff) utilize and amend their spaces to facilitate the learning