Teaching Research Methodologies to Professionally Oriented Honors Students

The benefits of encouraging undergraduate students to pursue independent research have been well documented (Craney; Guterman; Hathaway et al.; Ishiyama; Kremer and Bringle; Volkwein and Carbone). Introducing students to research processes and protocols is always a challenge, particularly for students enrolled in professionally oriented, discipline-specific colleges: so called “specialty schools.” In these colleges, preparing students to do high-level research is complicated by the nature and priorities of the students as well as by the particularities of the curriculum, which is invariably more restricted in scope than that of a conventional liberal arts college. Undergraduate specialty school students tend to be highly focused on preparing for their careers, and few plan to go on to research-oriented graduate programs. Nevertheless, specialty schools typically include many liberal arts requirements in their curricula in order to give students a well-rounded undergraduate education