High Impact Practices In Higher Education

This publication¿the latest report from AAC&U¿s Liberal Education and America¿s Promise (LEAP) initiative¿defines a set of educational practices that research has demonstrated have a significant impact on student success. Author George Kuh presents data from the National Survey of Student Engagement about these practices and explains why they benefit all students, but also seem to benefit underserved students even more than their more advantaged peers. The report also presents data that show definitively that underserved students are the least likely students, on average, to have access to these practices.

This volume offers the first comprehensive guide to how high-impact practices (HIPs) are being implemented in online environments and how they can be adjusted to meet the needs of online learners. This multi-disciplinary approach will assist faculty and administrators to effectively implement HIPs in distance education courses and online programs.With a chapter devoted to each of the eleven HIPs, this collection offers guidance that takes into account the differences between e-learners and traditional on-campus students.A primary goal of High-Impact Practices Online is to share the ways in which HIPs may need to be amended to meet the needs of online learners. Through specific examples and practical suggestions in each chapter, readers are introduced to concrete strategies for transitioning HIPs to the online environment that can be utilized across a range of disciplines and institution types. Each chapter of High-Impact Practices Online also references the most recent and relevant literature on each HIP so that readers are brought up to date on what makes online HIPs successful.The book provides guidance on how best to implement HIPs to increase retention and completion for online learners.

Research shows that enriching learning experiences such as learning communities, service-learning, undergraduate research, internships, and senior culminating experiences – collectively known as High-Impact Practices (HIPs) – are positively associated with student engagement; deep, and integrated learning; and personal and educational gains for all students – particularly for historically underserved students, including first-generation students and racially minoritized populations. While HIPs’ potential benefits for student learning, retention, and graduation are recognized and are being increasingly integrated across higher education programs, much of that potential remains unrealized; and their implementation frequently uneven. Colleges are eager to use the HIP nomenclature for recruitment, promoting equity for traditionally underserved student populations, and preparing lifelong learners and successful professionals. However, HIPs defy easy categorization or standardized implementation. They rely on fidelity, quality, and consistency – being “done well” – to achieve their learning outcomes; and, above all, require attention to access and equity if they are to fulfill their promise of benefitting all student populations equally.The goal of Delivering on the Promise of High-Impact Practices is to provide examples from around the country of the ways educators are advancing equity, promoting fidelity, achieving scale, and strengthening assessment of their own local high-impact practices. Its chapters bring together the best current scholarship, methodologies, and evidence-based practices within the HIPs field, illustrating new approaches to faculty professional development, culture and coalition building, research and assessment, and continuous improvement that help institutions understand and extend practices with a demonstrated high impact. For proponents and practitioners this book offers perspectives, data and critiques to interrogate and improve practice. For administrators it provides an understanding of what’s needed to deliver the necessary support.

"The Engaged Library provides case studies, examples, and discussion of how academic libraries can create successful partnerships to contribute to the integration of high-impact practices on their campuses, and ways to execute these practices well. Each chapter addresses one of the ten original high-impact practices through the lens of library partnerships, contributions, and opportunities, and provides ideas for and examples of outcomes assessment. A variety of types of institutions are included, and some chapters discuss initiatives that involve a combination of multiple practices. Across all of the chapters and case studies, you will find examples of well-orchestrated and engaging models that rely on instructional teams of faculty, advisers, librarians, and technology professionals to enhance and deepen the practices' impact on student learning"--www.alastore.ala.org.

"Threshold Concepts in Practice brings together fifty researchers from sixteen countries and a wide variety of disciplines to analyse their teaching practice, and the learning experiences of their students, through the lens of the Threshold Concepts Framework. In any discipline, there are certain concepts – the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ – whose acquisition is akin to passing through a portal. Learners enter new conceptual (and often affective) territory. Previously inaccessible ways of thinking or practising come into view, without which they cannot progress, and which offer a transformed internal view of subject landscape, or even world view. These conceptual gateways are integrative, exposing the previously hidden interrelatedness of ideas, and are irreversible. However they frequently present troublesome knowledge and are often points at which students become stuck. Difficulty in understanding may leave the learner in a ‘liminal’ state of transition, a ‘betwixt and between’ space of knowing and not knowing, where understanding can approximate to a form of mimicry. Learners navigating such spaces report a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, paradox, anxiety, even chaos. The liminal space may equally be one of awe and wonderment. Thresholds research identifies these spaces as key transformational points, crucial to the learner’s development but where they can oscillate and remain for considerable periods. These spaces require not only conceptual but ontological and discursive shifts. This volume, the fourth in a tetralogy on Threshold Concepts, discusses student experiences, and the curriculum interventions of their teachers, in a range of disciplines and professional practices including medicine, law, engineering, architecture and military education. Cover image: Detail from ‘Eve offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden and the serpent’ c.1520–25. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553). Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved.

"Building on previous AAC&U reports, this publication presents research on specific educational practices correlated with higher levels of academic challenge, student engagement, and achievement. The publication features the relationship between these practices and improvements in retention and graduation rates and advice on how to ensure that all students experience multiple high-impact practices. Detailed case studies show how five campuses are providing high-impact practices more pervasively and systematically."--Amazon

The Intersection of High-Impact Practices: What’s Next for Higher Education? examines high-impact practices and their impacts individually and collectively to demonstrate the added value of connecting high-impact practices. The research presented by Drs. Reilly and Turnbaugh-Langley illustrates that student success is not just a function of participation in one or many high-impact practices, but rather the order, timing, and interaction of these practices that yields the highest impact. These chapters discuss various high-impact practices such as study abroad experiences, student research initiatives, and internships to explore how these kinds of activities augment and enrich the success of students. The authors also speculate on where schools could increase the funding for these high-impact practices to maximize the institution’s return on investment. Ultimately, this book strongly advocates for not only the benefits of high-impact practices, but making sure students have multiple experiences with them.

Published in partnership with the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education First-year seminars and learning communities are two of the most commonly offered high-impact practices on U.S. campuses. The goals of these initiatives are similar: helping students make connections to faculty and other students, improving academic performance, and increasing persistence and graduation. As such, it is not surprising that many institutions choose to embed first-year seminars in learning communities. This volume explores the merger of these two high-impact practices. In particular, it offers insight into how institutions connect them and the impact of those combined structures on student learning and success. In addition to chapters highlighting strategies for designing, teaching in, and assessing combined programs, case studies offer practical insights into the structures of these programs in a variety of campus settings.