Today the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement released the 2015 Governor’s Honors Program Evaluation Report, which provides an in-depth look at how GHP participants—students, faculty/staff, and residential advisors—perceive the program and provides suggestions for further improvement.

The Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (GHP) is a residential summer program for gifted and talented high school students who will be rising juniors and seniors during the program. The program offers instruction that is significantly different from the typical high school classroom and that is designed to provide students with academic, cultural, and social enrichment necessary to become the next generation of global critical thinkers, innovators, and leaders. In 2015, 680 high school students from 75 out of 189 Georgia counties attended GHP at Valdosta State University.

The Governor’s Office of Student Achievement’s Research and Evaluation team conducted this evaluation. The evaluation team worked extensively with GHP administrators to identify the programmatic areas of most importance, design a plan to collect needed information, and analyze and report on the data. The 2015 GHP Evaluation Report includes:

  • A full demographic profile of students, faculty/staff, and residential advisors (where applicable),
  • A description of the evaluation instruments,
  • An overview of the survey respondents as compared to the total population,
  • A presentation of the survey results by group, and
  • A discussion of the findings, along with suggestions for future practice

The 2015 GHP Evaluation Report is divided into two main sections. The first section is a review of the program using administrative data. This section presents demographic profiles for each group of GHP participants—students, faculty/staff, and residential advisors. The second section is an analysis of the three online surveys given to each group of GHP participants. Each evaluation survey provides useful information about the experience of each group during GHP, as well as specific suggestions for future improvement.

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