High-Impact Practices

This set of eleven teaching and learning practices have been empirically demonstrated as educationally beneficial for engagement, learning, and persistence with especially significant gains shown for students whose demographic backgrounds have been historically underserved by higher education. 

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

Common reading programs are frequently identified as high-impact practices in that they engage students—often incoming students—in common intellectual experiences around a shared text. As a part of our strategic initiative to advance high‑impact educational practices, The Searle Center is excited to partner with the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement’s Campus Reading Program. Grounded in shared intellectual inquiry, the partnership centers around a shared text to foster inclusive dialogue, reflective pedagogy, and engaged learning across Northwestern’s 12 schools.

Searle will offer three complementary opportunities for connection, strengthening a culture of teaching as a scholarly, collaborative practice that centers multiple perspectives and respectful engagement with challenging ideas:

• Searle‑produced teaching resources offering pedagogical approaches and discussion frameworks that support constructive disagreement and inclusive dialogue;
• consultations, in which educational developers work with individual instructors and programs to support learning outcome and curricular alignment; and
• instructor reading circles that provide intentional spaces to explore the text together, reflect on its pedagogical possibilities, and exchange approaches across disciplinary contexts.