High-impact educational practices: leveling the playing field or perpetuating inequity?

ABSTRACT

While most of the discourse surrounding high-impact educational practices is laudatory, the current manifestation of these practices is not above scrutiny. The benefits of integrating high-impact educational practices into the United States college experience are well-documented, especially for students from groups that have been historically underserved by higher education; however, relative to their more traditionally advantaged counterparts, these populations face greater barriers in accessing these beneficial learning experiences. This paper synthesizes existing high-impact educational literature in the United States, highlights the importance of using an equity-minded framework when exploring the often-overlooked pitfalls in their implementation, and focuses on equal access and outcomes for historically underserved populations. In order to rectify inequities, this paper suggests an ambitious new direction that should systematically catalog existing, more accessible, modified high-impact practices and, subsequently, evaluate their effectiveness. Without this research agenda, high-impact educational practices may continue to perpetuate inequity.

KEYWORDS:

• equity
• equity-minded
• high-impact practices
• higher education
• pedagogy
• teaching practices

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this article, we focus on pedagogical practices at postsecondary institutions in the United States. While international literature discusses impactful teaching practices (e.g., internships in Europe and Portugal: Baert et al., 2019; Silva et al., 2016; first-year experiences/seminars in the Netherlands: van Herpen, 2019), these practices are rarely referred to as HIPs, nor are they situated within a HIPs pedagogical framework as defined by Kuh (2008). Despite this difference in terminology and analytic framing, this article has relevance for equity-minded impactful practices beyond the United States.

2 Underserved student populations are defined as students who come from groups that have been historically underrepresented in higher education; this includes students of color, students who enter college at lower preparation levels, and transfer, low-income, and first-generation students. In this paper, we discuss access and student success outcomes for underserved students relative to their peers from traditionally advantaged groups, such as students who are white and of higher socioeconomic status. This research illustrates how HIPs is part of institutional curricula that privileges students from traditionally advantaged groups.