This is a face-to-face workshop series. These concepts are applicable to any course format and type!
High Impact Practices, or HIPs, are evidence-based educational experiences proven to increase student engagement and academic success (Kuh, 2008). To be classified as a HIP, the experience must achieve deep learning for students, advance significant engagement gains, and provide positive impact to our most underserved student populations. However, it is not enough to simply offer HIPs to students and expect to see gains in learning and engagement. Instead, HIPs must be done well or implemented intentionally with quality to provide positive benefits to student outcomes (Kuh, 2010). The Eight Key Elements are the shared characteristics of what makes HIPs effective, but they are not unique to HIPs alone. These Eight Key Elements also serve as principles to inform the design and delivery of nearly every learning experience (Kuh & O’Donnell, 2013).
Why do HIPs and the Eight Key Elements matter to classroom instruction?
Our courses are the one place all students may experience the Eight Key Elements. It is these elements that leverage the “high impact” to increase achievement, graduation, retention, and learning for students. In this workshop series, several tools will be introduced along with opportunities to practice embedding the Eight Key Elements across courses and curricula. To increase the sustainability of these HIPs course designs, the workshops will introduce several strategies to maintain these features across time, changing TAs, adjunct and new instructors, GER courses, multiple sections, and throughout your curriculum. We will explore online and face-to-face UWM course examples of one of the Eight Key Elements each month that this series occurs.
Please register and encourage colleagues from your unit or department to attend. Participants will be encouraged to share their successful and challenging course applications in a Canvas Discussion between the monthly meetings.
Eight Key Elements of HIPs
Kuh and O’Donnell (2013) identified a set of pedagogical principles, also known as the Eight Key Elements of HIPs. Each HIP integrates multiple key elements that promote deep learning and student development. The Eight Key Elements that are listed below ensure that HIPs are effective by emphasizing rigorous standards, active and collaborative learning, diverse experiences, continuous feedback, reflective practice, and real-world application.
Description: Students are challenged beyond their current ability levels at higher, more complex levels than “identify, define, and explain”.
Examples:
- Create modules that meet the complexity level of the course outcome, with assignments and their rubrics set at higher levels of learning.
- Incorporate content, tasks, inquiry-intensive projects and instructions that aim for more complex levels of learning, problem solving, analyzing and formulating.
Description: Students come together in groups, teams, learning communities, and discussions.
Examples:
- Discuss common readings and share topic-based media. Evaluate discussion group postings and encourage student replies; create a system that facilitates peer mentoring and peer reviews.
- Meet outside of class, attend events, have mandatory interactions with the instructor.
Description: Students must meet with instructors (or peers) and receive suggestions at various points to discuss problems, challenges, progress, and next steps through to completion.
Examples:
- Weekly reading and summarization tasks, discussion posts, homework problems, designs, lab reports and activities.
- Low stakes assessments, periodic quizzing and polling modules, peer reviews with instructor feedback and scaffolded assignments with rubrics for each step.
Description: Students work over the course of the academic term on multiple-part assignments.
Examples:
- Assignments, group tasks and community engagement activities with periodic feedback given on work.
- Scaffolded projects, papers, presentations and tasks that require higher levels of time invested.
Description: Students must interact in settings with people of backgrounds and demographics unfamiliar to them.
Examples:
- Assignments, activities, low stakes assessments, exams, readings, sharing relevant media and journaling observations and making connections between classes and experiences, exploring archives.
- Interactive environments involving guest speakers, virtual reality, data, artifacts, cases, performances, demonstrations, activities, imagery and simulations.
- Field experiences and service-learning; immersing students in diverse demographic settings, attending events and interviewing.
Description: Students must recap and elaborate upon learned concepts and how they connect at various points in the course, drawing upon materials and explaining proficiencies.
Examples:
- Concept mapping, requirements for reflective posts and essays, portfolios, journals and visuals.
- Logging interpretations and implications; encouraging broader perspectives through pre- and post-assessment reflections.
Description: Students engaging in activities that extend the classroom learning into practical, real-world environments. This enables them to apply theoretical knowledge to actual situations, enhancing understanding and retention of learned material.
Examples:
- Internships, practicum, or field placements that require students apply the knowledge and skills acquired during their program of study.
- Supervisor-mediated discussions among student workers that encourage students to reflect on and see the connections between their studies and experiences in the work setting.
Description: To peers, faculty, work-setting, supervising staff, supervisor, or faculty member, panelists, boards, reviewers, committees, etc.
Examples:
- Courses could include a required oral narrative, demonstration, production or performance evaluated by peers, instructors, or other staff members.
- Including structured presentations, debates, exhibits or performances.
References
1Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S. D. (2013). Ensuring Quality & Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale. AAC&U, Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/publication/ensuring-quality-and-taking-high-impact-practices-to-scale
Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Kuh, G. D. (2010). Student Success in College Creating Conditions That Matter. Wiley.
Kuh, G. D., & O’Donnell, K. (2013). Eight Key Elements and Examples. In Ensuring Quality & Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale. AAC&U.
Additional Resources
Finley, A. (2019, November). A comprehensive approach to assessment of high-impact practices (Occasional Paper No. 41). National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA).
Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., Reed, S. D. (2013). Ensuring quality & taking high-impact practices to scale. Association of American Colleges and Universities.
High Impact Practices: An Educator’s Guide: Self-paced modules created by the National Association of System Heads
Eight Key Elements of High-Impact Practices Comparison by AAC&U
Eight Key Elements Tip Sheet from the University of Arizona