High-Impact Practices (HIPs)

The following have been identified as high-impact practices:

• Capstone Courses and Projects
• Collaborative Assignments and Projects
• Common Intellectual Experiences
• Community Engaged Learning (Service Learning)
• Diversity/Global Learning
• ePortfolios
• First-Year Seminars and Experiences
• Internships
• Learning Communities
• Undergraduate Research
• Writing-Intensive Courses

In Ensuring Quality & Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale, Kuh and O'Donnell (2013) identified eight key features:

1. Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels
2. Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time;
3. Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters;
4. Experiences with diversity, wherein students are exposed to and must contend with people and circumstances that differ from those with which students are familiar;
5. Frequent, timely and constructive feedback;
6. Periodic, structure opportunities to reflect and integrate learning;
7. Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications
8. Public demonstrations of competence.

Combined, these elements create a powerful approach to helping students achieve academic, career, and life success. Educational developers at the Searle Center support instructors in their efforts to teach in this high-impact way.