High-Impact Practices in Higher Education: Definition and Examples

High-Impact Practices (HIPs) refer to a variety of active learning approaches in education that have been shown to increase student engagement and retention. These practices foster key student outcomes and can be especially beneficial for students from underserved backgrounds.

Introduction

High-impact practices in higher education are educational experiences that have been shown to be highly beneficial for student learning and development. These practices promote active learning, engagement, and deeper understanding of course material. They also provide opportunities for students to develop important skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and communication.

Defining High-Impact Practices

The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) introduced 10 educational practices in 2007 that were seen as foundational to a 21st-century liberal education. In 2008, George D. Kuh identified these learning experiences as HIPs in the report “High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter.” In 2016, AAC&U added ePortfolios as the eleventh HIP.

The Eleven High-Impact Practices

Here is a summary of the eleven HIPs:

First-Year Seminars and Experiences: These programs help students transition to university life by providing smaller learning environments and direct access to instructors. The most effective seminars encourage frequent writing, critical inquiry, and collaborative assignments to build students’ information literacy.
Common Intellectual Experiences: These require the study of courses and programs covering different broad themes.
Learning Communities: These create a common platform where students can explore a big topic or question through the perspectives of different disciplines. Students take two or more linked courses as a group and work closely with one another and with their professors.
Writing-Intensive Courses: These courses help students develop written communication skills through a process of writing, feedback, revision, and finalization of different writing forms to address a variety of audiences and disciplines.
Collaborative Assignments and Projects: These encourage students to develop teamwork, problem-solving, and active listening skills. These can take the form of small study groups, team-based learning, and group projects.
Undergraduate Research: Involves institutions adjusting their courses to encourage students to engage in the research process, particularly in “actively contested questions, empirical observation, cutting-edge technologies, and more”.
Diversity/Global Learning: Focuses on helping students to access diverse cultures, experiences, and perspectives.
Service Learning, Community-Based Learning: This involves students working with community partners to apply their learned knowledge in real-world settings to solve existing problems, then reflecting on these authentic experiences in classes.
Internships: These aim to provide students with authentic experience and nurture lifelong skills in real-world settings relevant to their study areas.
Capstone Courses and Projects: These are courses or projects at the end of the learning process that require students to reflect on what they have learned and synthesize their products of performance. This HIP can be in the form of writing assignments, portfolios, presentations, and performances.
ePortfolios: These allow students to compile all the information that reflects their academic progress and share this with their peers, instructors, faculties, and future employers. ePortfolios should be established throughout the student’s learning experience.

Importance of High-Impact Practices

HIPs are important because they create a positive impact on student learning, especially on student engagement and active learning. HIPs deepen students’ commitment to their academic program and growth, promote frequent and meaningful interactions, ensure an inclusive learning environment, encourage opportunities for constructive feedback, and develop a growth mindset and real-life skills.

Read also: Job Skills for Students

Benefits of High-Impact Practices

Student involvement with HIPs is linked to many educational benefits, including:

Deep learning and personal development.
Increased odds of retention.
Greater academic achievement.

Furthermore, the benefits of HIP participation accumulate such that when students participate in multiple HIPs, they are likely to experience more positive outcomes. Participation may be especially beneficial for students from underserved backgrounds, minimizing outcome disparities between groups.

Pedagogical Considerations for Implementing HIPs

For an educational experience to be truly considered “high-impact” and promote engagement, instructors are advised to attend to several pedagogical considerations. Kuh and O'Donnell (2013) identified the "eight key elements of HIPs" which are important to consider when integrating any HIP into your course. These building blocks of HIPs contribute to students’ academic achievement, persistence, personal development, civic engagement, and sense of belonging on campus.

Eight Key Elements of HIPs

Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels: Identify expectations and course outcomes that are appropriate for students’ developmental readiness. Sequence your course in ways that appropriately challenge students and encourage their growth over the course of the term.
Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time: Guide students to exert significant time and effort toward educationally purposeful activities. As students invest more time and energy into their curricular and co-curricular experiences, they are more likely to realize the desired outcomes of an undergraduate education.
Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters: Facilitate shared experiences between students, their peers, and you as their instructor throughout your course. Working with others prompts students to problem-solve while actively considering the input of peers with unique perspectives.
Experiences with diversity: Guide students to step outside their comfort zones and engage with diverse worldviews. Establish and maintain a learning environment where students from diverse backgrounds can feel comfortable sharing their unique experiences, actively consider new ideas, and respectfully disagree with one another.
Frequent, timely, and constructive feedback: Provide students with frequent and high-quality feedback to bolster students’ engagement in an experience and direct their future efforts toward educationally purposive activities.
Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning: Provide opportunities for students to engage in reflective practice to synthesize what they are learning, deepen their levels of self-awareness, and reframe their perspectives.
Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications: Provide students opportunities to apply what they learn from involvement with a HIP in new settings and scenarios.
Public demonstration of competence: Consider ways for students to share their learning with others, such as presenting to classmates, publishing an ePortfolio, or submitting an internship project for review.

Integrating HIPs into Courses

Some HIPs can be embedded as learning activities in any course, such as collaborative assignments, research projects, or ePortfolios. Other times a course is based around a specific HIP, as with service-learning and writing-intensive courses.

Course Types and Experiences

Capstone Experiences

Capstone experiences refer to culminating courses or projects that require students to think back on what they have learned and synthesize disparate pieces of information. Oftentimes, capstone experiences occur at the end of a student's experience, such as during their senior year or final semester before graduation. Examples include writing assignments, portfolios, presentations, and performances.

First-Year Seminars

The first year of college is a time of transition as students acclimate to university life. First-year seminars allow for more intimate learning environments and direct access to instructors, helping students build mentoring relationships and navigate the transition to college. The most effective first-year seminars encourage frequent writing, critical inquiry, and collaborative assignments to build students’ information literacy.

Global Learning

Global learning involves analysis of how interdependent systems (e.g., natural, physical, social, cultural, economic, political) affect peoples’ lives and the earth’s wellbeing. Education abroad is one example of global learning, but many institutions have offered new courses in recent years that allow students to engage in conversations about world issues without ever leaving campus. Through their involvement with global learning, “students should 1) become informed, open-minded, and responsible people who are attentive to diversity across the spectrum of differences, 2) seek to understand how their actions affect both local and global communities, and 3) address the world’s most pressing and enduring issues collaboratively and equitably” (AAC&U, n.d.).

Internships

Internships provide students with direct experience in a work setting-usually related to their career interests-and give them the benefit of supervision and coaching from professionals in the field. If the internship is taken for course credit, students complete a project or paper that is approved by a faculty member.

Service-Learning

In these programs, field-based “experiential learning” with community partners is an instructional strategy-and often a required part of the course. The idea is to give students direct experience with issues they are studying in the curriculum and with ongoing efforts to analyze and solve problems in the community. A key element in these programs is the opportunity students have to both apply what they are learning in real-world settings and reflect in a classroom setting on their service experiences.

Expanding the Definition of HIPs

Co-curricular and extracurricular experiences-such as student leadership roles, affinity groups, campus employment, and civic engagement-are just as experientially rich and often more accessible to students than formalized academic HIPs. Expanding the definition of HIPs to include more democratized and active experiences is crucial.

Read also: Eligibility for National Awards

Examples of Expanded HIPs

Participation in affinity groups.
Meaningful campus employment.
Civic engagement initiatives.

Addressing Challenges and Promoting Equity

The time investment and financial resources needed to participate in some HIPs can be a barrier to participation when students have competing commitments such as caring for family, commuting to school, or working a job. Integrating HIPs into the core university curriculum can promote equity and inclusion, allowing all students to engage with high-impact learning as part of their daily student experience.

High-Impact Practices and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

High-Impact Practices (HIPs) are proven, evidence-based strategies that enhance engagement, learning, and inclusivity, particularly in diverse educational and workplace environments. One powerful example of a High-Impact Practice is a mentorship program tailored to first-generation college students from diverse backgrounds.

Examples of High-Impact Practices in Action

Last semester, Brutus enrolled in a service-learning course focused on improving peoples’ physical activity. Brutus built new relationships with community partners, learned about root causes of inactivity, and is now considering graduate programs in public health.
After completing an introductory engineering course in the fall, Michelle joined her instructor’s research lab. Assisting in the lab helped Michelle gain confidence in her research abilities, make connections between her coursework and research activities, and develop strong relationships with faculty mentors.
By enrolling in a senior capstone course, Gabe was able to reflect on the totality of her undergraduate career and draw meaning from her most transformational experiences. She has now decided to pursue a career in educational policy.

tags: #high #impact #practices #in #higher #education