In 2007, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) introduced the concept of “high-impact practices” (HIPs), the educational strategies proven to significantly enhance student engagement and active learning.
So what exactly are the HIPs and how can they be incorporated into the curriculum? In this article, we explore the definition, impact, and key elements to consider when implementing HIPs and how you can incorporate HIPs into your courses.
What are HIPs?
George D. Kuh, Chancellor’s Professor of higher education at Indiana University-Bloomington then identified 10 learning experiences considered as HIPs in their report – ”High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter” published in 2008. In 2016, ePortfolio was added as the eleventh HIP. Below you can find a brief summary of all the HIPs:
- Capstone Courses and Projects: refer to 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.
- Collaborative Assignments and Projects: encourages students to develop several collaboration skills namely teamwork, problem-solving, and active listening. This HIP can take the form of small study groups, team-based learning, group projects, and more.
- Common Intellectual Experiences: require the study courses and programs to cover different broad themes
- Diversity/Global Learning: focuses on helping students to access diverse cultures, experiences, and perspectives.
- ePortfolios: allow students to compile all the information that reflects their academic progress and share this with other relevant stakeholders: their peers, instructors, faculties, and future employers. ePortfolios should be established throughout the student’s learning experience.
- First-Year Seminars and Experiences: Make the transition to university more comfortable for freshmen, by building instructor-student interactions and encouraging the development of information literacy. “Frequent writing, critical inquiry, and collaborative assignments” are among the common methods of the First-Year Seminars.
- Internships: aim to provide students with authentic experience and nurture lifelong skills in the real-work settings relevant to their study areas.
- Learning Communities: Create a common platform where students can explore a big topic or question through the perspectives of different disciplines.
- Service Learning, Community-Based Learning: involves students working with community partners to apply their learned knowledge in real-world settings to solve existing problems, then reflect on these authentic experiences in classes.
- 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”.
- Writing-Intensive Courses: Get students to develop written communication through a process of writing, feedback, revision, and finalization of different writing forms to address a variety of audiences and disciplines.
How to integrate the HIPs into your course? 8 key considerations
According to George Kuh and Ken O’Donnell, an educational experience considered “high impact” needs to address 8 pedagogical considerations. Successful implementation of HIPs in any learning experience, therefore, requires the fulfillment of each of these guiding principles.
1. Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels
The first thing to consider when implementing a HIP is to establish clear expectations and objectives that foster lifelong skills and a growth mindset. When drafting the course guidelines, make sure to consider students’ diverse backgrounds and learning preferences, and sequence the activities to effectively challenge students and encourage positive growth.
Harmonize offers different functionalities to make the expectations-setting process easier and more effective for faculties. The streamlined interface across allows instructors to master the assignment setup. For every learning activity, instructors can easily create detailed instructions, use multimedia, and set milestones that clarify expected participation.
2. Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time
Time and effort are foundational to HIP pedagogy; therefore, the courses and activities should be curated to motivate students to invest more time and energy in the entire learning process. Group projects, research reports, and portfolios are some of the great ways to foster substantial time investment, as they require students to engage in different summative tasks before arriving at the final products.
With a range of solutions that support varied pedagogies and learning practices, Harmonize can help instructors design diverse activities for knowledge uptake, application, discussion, feedback, reflection, and more. From group projects using a variety of communication channels to student-led and small-group discussions, Harmonize was built with student collaboration in mind.
3. Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters
Opportunities to engage in multi-layer interactions (instructor-student, student-student, student-content) are critical to enhance engagement and retention. Similar to RSI, that’s why a HIP should foster meaningful interactions to encourage the development of collaboration, problem-solving, and critical thinking.
With Harmonize, instructors have plenty of options to optimize varied learning activities and pedagogical approaches to stimulate meaningful interactions and continuous engagement — including conducting polls, surveys, evaluations, and Q&A sessions for providing feedback and student guidance.
4. Experiences with diversity, wherein students demonstrate intercultural competence and empathy with people and worldview frameworks that differ from their own
A high-impact learning activity should foster a learning environment where students of different backgrounds, learning preferences, and worldviews feel welcome to share and exchange ideas. This can be achieved by ensuring that the content curation, course policy establishment, and communication are transparent and open to diverse perspectives.
With Harmonize, online discussion forums are among the best ways to initiate this type of conversation, which can be easily created using the discussion tools.
5. Frequent, timely, and constructive feedback
Feedback has always remained a key element to successful learning, being one of the most powerful drivers behind learners’ achievement. The benefits of feedback are countless, from improving students’ knowledge of the subject matter, quality of final work, connections with peers, and most importantly, their development of lifelong skills. To generate positive outcomes, feedback should be frequent, timely, and growth-oriented. Furthermore, feedback should be initiated from not only the instructors but also from the students. That is, multi-level feedback is critical to implement a HIP.
Harmonize tools enable the design, and facilitation of an effective instructor and peer review feedback.
6. Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning
Meaningful reflection is further aided when peers or instructors provide quality feedback, ask critical questions, and help students develop key ideas. Experts have argued that students are most likely to realize the full benefits associated with reflection when they receive high-quality feedback on their insights but aren’t graded for their work. This approach allows students to assign personal meaning and significance to reflection rather than seeking others’ approval.
A HIP needs to motivate students to engage in reflective practices to develop self-regulation and self-directed learning. To create activities with meaningful reflections, faculties must:
- Make sure students know how to reflect on their own work using proper guidelines and feedback criteria
- Offer students sufficient time for in-depth reflection
- Provide feedback on students’ self-reflection to let them know their strengths and areas to improve
Besides peer review and instructor assessment, Harmonize supports the implementation of self-reflection due to its benefits in promoting accountability in learning. Students can critically evaluate their own work based on the criteria & rubrics set by the instructor. Thus, instructors can motivate students to have ownership of their own learning effectively.
7. Opportunities to discover the relevance of learning through real-world applications
When engaging in HIPs, it is important that students be given opportunities to apply their learned knowledge in real-life situations via authentic teaching and assessment. Pedagogy centered on real-world application promotes deeper learning and nurtures real-life skills relevant to students’ future work.
One effective way to achieve this principle is to provide authentic assessment practices that replicate real-life problems. Whether you ask students to prepare a research paper, develop a business proposal, do a case study, record a podcast, or present a topic in the classroom, Harmonize can help you assess them based on your learning objectives.
8. Public demonstration of competence
Finally, a HIP should present students with multiple ways to demonstrate their learning with others, such as presentations, ePortfolio, written reports, podcasts, and such. The process of preparing a product for showcase encourages students to articulate their learning with accuracy and quality.
Harmonize’s abundant tools help instructors vary the means of expression for students. They can choose how to showcase the final work and product in the form of a group research paper, poster, presentation, podcast, or video. For example, students can upload multimedia content for discussion and feedback with instructors and their peers.
Incorporating high-impact practices (HIPs) into academic programs has been shown to significantly enhance student engagement and active learning. By following these eight pedagogical considerations, educators can deepen students’ commitment to their academic program, promote meaningful interactions throughout the learning experience, ensure an inclusive learning environment, encourage opportunities for constructive feedback, and develop real-life skills critical to students’ future life and work.
