Delivering on the Promise of High-Impact Practices: Research and Models for Achieving Equity, Fidelity, Impact, and Scale

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.

Jillian Kinzie is Associate Director of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute. She is also a senior scholar with the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) project.

Jerry Daday is a professor of sociology and the executive associate dean in the Institute for Engaged Learning at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He works with a team of faculty and staff striving to ensure the equitable progression of IUPUI’s 20,000 undergraduate students through pathways ofscaffolded engaged learning experiences beginning in the first-year experience through their capstone experience.

Ken O’Donnell is vice provost and professor of communication at California State University Dominguez Hills. He has been an energetic proponent of high-impact practices since working at the CSU Office of the Chancellor, where he successfully won several million dollars in public and philanthropic funding to support HIPs implementation and assessment across California.

Carleen Vande Zande is the associate vice president for academic programs and faculty advancement at the University of Wisconsin System Administration. She is also a tenured professor of educational leadership at the University ofWisconsin-Oshkosh. She has facilitated HIPs development activities at the campus and system levels for several years and is interested in ways to integrate HIPs into student success strategies as well as incorporating HIPs into university level assessment.

John Zilvinskis is an assistant professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York. By training, he is a survey researcher who studies the engagement of college students and his research has been published in Research in Higher Education, The Review of Higher Education, the Journal of College Student Development and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education.