High Impact Practices (HIPs)

Evidence that HIPs work

High-Impact Practices are evidence based educational strategies. This can be understood in two ways. First, each strategy is grounded in a body of research. Second, faculty are encouraged to gather evidence in their own classrooms to assess whether their HIPs are working as expected.

A faculty example of gathering evidence

In Spring 2022, one faculty member identified feedback as an element of High-Impact Practice teaching that she wanted to improve. She gave written feedback for a signature assignment in one class. She found research which suggests screencast videos are a more effective feedback tool. She implemented this change in Spring 2022, and she assessed it.

The assessment was simple and revealed a positive impact. She gave a short survey to students who indicated almost 100% positive reactions to receiving video feedback on their work. She also compared grades on the assignments and overall grades to previous semesters. Both were significantly higher. She also reflected on her own experience, since creating the videos was not easy at first. She has decided to continue with this innovation after finding an easier way to create feedback videos.

Programmatic examples of gathering evidence

Community Based Learning The Office of Experiential Education works with Institutional Research to collect data on Community Based Learning (Service Learning). For example, the found the retention rate for students who participated in Community Based Learning in Fall 2019 was 16% points higher than those who didn’t. This has been a consistent trend at Bristol Community College and at other institutions across the nation which have scaled HIPs.

Accelerated Developmental Math The Math department reorganized our developmental course structure to a co-requisite model. Some students who require remedial courses can take these courses alongside the college level course. This model has worked at many other institutions and initial data from before the pandemic shows positive impacts as well.

In Fall 2019, there was a 75.5% success rate (grades of A,B,C, or D) in the co-requisite developmental Math model. These students saved both time and money as a result of the co-requisite model.

Another major benefit addresses the equity agenda. In our most popular math class, MTH 119 Fundamental Statistics, all ethnic/racial groups achieved similar success rates with Black or African American students slightly outperforming all others (n=348).