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...from large, Midwestern university. A demographic questionnaire, the general academic subscale and the general-self subscale of the Self-Description Questionnaire III (Marsh & O'Neill, 1984), and the Leadership and Achievement Aspirations subscale of the Career Aspirations Scale (O'Brien, 1992) were used. Results indicate significant differences between juniors and seniors with regards to academic self-concept, educational aspirations, and career aspirations. Implications for honors faculty and administrators are discussed.
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Some research indicates honors college graduates are fairly homogeneous (Wittig, Schurr, & Ruble, 1986-1987), and other research indicates honors students cannot be typified (Laycock, 1984; Robinson, 1997). However, insufficient research exists to allow researchers to draw definitive conclusions regarding the characteristics of honors college students. Relative to the areas of college student development and gifted education, very little research has combined these areas and examined the gifted college student (Rinn & Plucker, 2004).
Several researchers have studied the differences between honors students and nonhonors students. For example, honors college students are likely more perfectionistic (Parker & Adkins, 1995; Neumeister, 2004), more likely to plan to attend graduate or professional school (Randall, Salzwedel, Cribbs, & Sedlack, 1990), differ with regard to personality type (Randall & Copeland, 1986-1987), and are more autonomous (Gottsdanker, 1968; Palmer & Wohl, 1972) than nonhonors students. In a comparison of honors students and nonhonors students of equal ability, Rinn (2004) found honors students had significantly higher grade point averages, academic self-concepts, and career aspirations than nonhonors students.
Honors and nonhonors students may differ as a function of honors program membership, or they may differ as a function of precollege characteristics. In other words, in the aforementioned study, it is difficult to know if honors students' high academic achievement, high self-concepts, and high career aspirations existed prior to enrollment or were developed during membership in an honors program. Thus, honors students may have joined an honors program because they already had high self-concepts and high aspirations, and had high grade point averages in high school. Focused students may participate in selective programs to aid them in achieving the high aspirations they have already set for themselves. Indeed, Gerrity, Lawrence, and Sedlacek (1993) found 34% of 231 honors college students joined an honors college as preparation for graduate school and 18% believed honors college participation would help them to get a better job. We do not, however, know what happens to honors students as they move through higher education. If they all enter honors programs with similar goals, why is the attrition rate so high?
When studying gifted college students, most researchers focus on these students as a group (Rinn & Plucker, 2004). Little research has been conducted to examine the differences among honors students of varying class standing (freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior). The importance of studying average-ability college students across class standing (see Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991) and studying gifted students at the elementary and secondary level with regard to grade level (Clark, 2002) has been noted, however.
The relationship among academic achievement, self-concept, and aspirations has also been noted with populations of average-ability college students (see Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991) and gifted students at the elementary and secondary level (see Davis & Rimm, 2004). Again, little research has examined these constructs among gifted college students (Rinn, 2004), yet academic achievement, self-concept, and aspirations are strongly connected to issues of retention and attrition (Tinto, 1975). The following review of research is intended to provide the reader with an overview of the literature that pertains to the academic achievement, academic self-concept, general self-concept, educational aspirations, and career aspirations of college students and/or gifted students as a function of their year in school.
For the purposes of this research, a gifted college student can be defined as one who is a member of an honors program in a college or university setting. Because identification of giftedness at the postsecondary level is very difficult due to the lack of standardized assessments, membership in an honors program is often used as an indicator of giftedness at the postsecondary level (Rinn & Plucker, 2004).
Review of Research
Academic Achievement
Pflaum, Pascarella, and Duby (1985) found honors college participation was associated with high academic achievement during the first year of college, and Rinn (2004) and Shushok (2003) found gifted honors students had higher academic achievement than gifted nonhonors students. Very little research exists concerning the academic achievement of college students, separate from research that examines academic achievement in relation to some other construct, such as self-concept or aspirations (see Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991).
Most honors programs in the United States have minimum grade point average requirements (Digby, 1999). That is, to remain a member of the honors program, students have to maintain a minimum grade point average (usually around a 3.3 on a 4.0 scale). It is therefore unlikely that gifted upperclassmen will have differing grade point averages from other honors underclassmen, as those with low grade point averages are not allowed to remain in an honors program.
Academic Self-Concept
Self-concept can be defined as "a person's perceptions of him- or herself ... formed through experience with and interpretations of one's environment" (Marsh & Shavelson, 1985, p. 107). Academic self-concept can thus be defined as the way one feels about his or her academic abilities.
Pascarella and Terenzini (1991) cited evidence to suggest college students' academic self-concepts decline during the freshman year. From here, they argued students' academic self-concepts increase, such that by the end of a student's senior year, his or her academic self-concept is greater than it was at the beginning of the freshman year (see also Astin, 1977; Pascarella, Smart, Ethington, & Nettles, 1987). Reynolds (1988) has argued that the increase in academic self-concept seen from the first to the last year in college is due to both general maturation and a process of selective mortality, whereby students with poor grades and poor adjustment drop out of college, thus resulting only in students with positive perceptions of their abilities by the senior year. House (1993) found students' academic self-concept to be a strong predictor of subsequent school withdrawal, indicating those with low academic self-concepts may indeed drop out of school. Academic self-concept may also increase as a function of age. Research indicates academic self-concept increases naturally during late adolescence and early adulthood (Marsh, 1989a), which corresponds with the college-age years.
Among the research on gifted students at the elementary and secondary level, the decrease in self-concept seen after joining a selective program is due to the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect (BFLPE; Marsh, 1987; Marsh & Parker, 1984). When a gifted student enters a gifted program after having been part of a mixed ability...
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