Honors Project Information

The Honors projects are at the heart of your Honors program academic experience. These are opportunities to work one-on-one with faculty members in areas of your interest and can take almost any form. We have had students pursue a wide variety of projects, including contributing to faculty research agendas, developing independent research projects, building pedagogical tools for classroom experience, and producing works of art. We encourage you to discuss project ideas with faculty in your fields of interest. 

Individual instructors and Honors Program students will work together to develop learning objectives, learning activities, and means of evaluation for the project.

As a rule of thumb, this might serve as a guide: 

1. Add-on Projects should challenge the student to develop an in-depth understanding of subject matters of the course beyond the usual content of the course.
2. Add-on Projects should incorporatee a range of high-quality, credible, relevant sources that are appropriate for the discipline and genre to develop project ideas, rather than relying solely on discipline textbooks.
3. Add-on Projects should provide opportunities for students to develop discipline appropriate skills for documenting information gathered for developing the topic, resulting in a written demonstration of acquired knowledge that uses discipline appropriate documentation format (i.e., APA, MLA, etc.). This may be a reflection paper, journal, or formal research paper, as appropriate.
4. Add-on projects should challenge students to develop and apply critical thinking skills. It should provide opportunities for students to think, read, write, create and present using a wide range of strategies and levels of complexity.
5. Add-on projects should provide opportunities for both EXPERIENCE and REFLECTION. Experience refers to active learning, problem-based learning, team-based learning, and may include field trips, site visits, experiments, simulations, debates and other co-curricular activities. Reflection refers to student engagement in various levels of thinking not only about the topic/subject of the project, but also in "thinking about thinking" and understanding the nature of learning.

We have also encouraged faculty to list existing research projects that they are interested in having Honors students plug into. If any of these existing projects are of interest to you, please contact us at honors@tamut.edu.