The Influence of the College Environment on Honors Students' Outcomes

Honors programs at colleges and universities are one way to provide additional learning opportunities to enhance the undergraduate experience for students. Honors programs provide students academically enriching activities through small classes, research, internships, and community service (National Collegiate Honors Council, n.d.). To further the knowledge surrounding the influence of the living environment in honors programs, particularly living-learning communities (LLCs), we examined the experiences of honors students at one university.

Current literature shows that honors students experience academic, cognitive, and other gains (e.g., critical thinking measures for class assignments) from involvement in an honors program, even when higher levels of cognitive ability were controlled as input variables (Seifert, Pascarella, Colangelo, & Assouline, 2007; Soldner, McCarron, & Inkelas, 2007). Although honors program students in general reported benefits from higher levels of academic-related peer discussions or interactions (Inkelas & Weisman, 2003; Seifert et al., 2007; Shushok, 2006), they were less likely than other students to study in groups. When they did, they often formed narrow peer groups that were not well integrated into the rest of the campus (Rinn, 2004). Honors students in LLCs were more likely than other students in LLCs to interact with faculty members socially outside of class (Inkelas & Weisman, 2003) and in conversations about career goals (Shushok, 2006). Despite many gains, the literature findings are inconclusive as to whether honors students in LLCs developed a stronger sense of belonging amongst peers with whom they could talk about ideas and have discussions outside of class (Dallas & Marwitz, 2003; Soldner et al., 2007).

Conceptual Framework

In the current study, Bronfenbrenner's (1993) ecological paradigm was used to examine honors students' experiences and interactions within different residential settings. According to Brofenbrenner's ecological paradigm, "Development is an evolving function of person-environment interaction," which must take place in a face-to-face setting, or a microsystem (p. 10). Multiple microsystems for college students continually affect the development and experience of the individual and include residence halls, campus jobs, or student organizations (Renn & Arnold, 2003) in addition to academic disciplines. When two or more microsystems or settings are linked together with the individual, a mesosystem results (Bronfenbrenner, 1993). Since limited research has been conducted to examine the influence of the environment on learning outcomes for honors program students (Rinn, 2004; Soldner et al., 2007), we examined the mesosystem of honors students' living experiences at a research-extensive university.

Methods

Research Questions

The current study examined how self-reported experiences of honors college students are the same or different from those of students who live in each of the following four environments: (a) an honors college floor that is part of an academically based LLC, (b) an honors college floor that is not part of a LLC, (c) honors students on a traditional residence hall floor, and (d) students not in an honors program or a LLC and on a traditional residence hall floor. More specifically, we sought to answer the following:

1. 1. Do honors residential students in various living environments report different outcomes?

2. 2. Do honors residential students report different outcomes than students living in traditional learning environments in significant ways?

Participants

Our data were obtained from a larger study that explored students' perceptions of their residence hall environment at a research-extensive, Midwestern university (MWU). There were 272 honors students (132 were living on an honors floor, 88 were living in an academically based LLC, 52 were on a traditional residence hall floor) and 1,593 students not in an honors program who completed the surveys. Sixty-three percent (n = 1174) of the respondents were female. Eighty percent (n = 1,314) of the participants identified as White; 3.2% (n = 53) as African American; and 6.9% (n = 113) as Asian American. Although the sample had a slightly higher percentage of females, it was generally representative of MWU.

We used a census approach to data collection (sending surveys to all students in the residence halls) to reduce the likelihood of coverage error (i.e., when someone has a 0% chance of being sampled) and sampling error (when...