High-impact practices

The list belongs to AAC&U

AAC&U maintains the taxonomy, and AAC&U is the authority on its current contents. The published list runs to twelve practices: first-year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, diversity and global learning, service learning and community-based learning, internships, capstone courses and projects, ePortfolios, and open educational resources.

Take the current list and its descriptions from AAC&U directly rather than from a secondary summary, including this one. The taxonomy has been revised before (open educational resources is a later addition), and a self-study written against a superseded version invites a question you do not want in the room.

What the practices have in common

The list is not an arbitrary collection. The practices share a set of conditions that the underlying research associates with the benefit: sustained effort over time rather than a single event, substantive interaction with faculty and peers, experience of working with people unlike oneself, frequent and meaningful feedback, and a public demonstration of what was learned.

Those conditions are the useful part of the concept for practitioners. They give you a design specification rather than a checklist, and they explain why two programs with the same name can produce different results.

Use the phrase precisely, because it is doing real work

“High-impact practice” appears in accreditation narratives, strategic plans, and budget requests, where it functions as a claim about an evidence base. Applied to any program that is well-liked, the phrase stops meaning anything, and the loss lands on the colleagues who need it in the one document where precision matters.

The discipline is simple: if the practice is on AAC&U’s list, name it and say so. If it is not, describe what it does and which of the conditions above it satisfies. That second sentence is usually more persuasive than the label anyway.

Where co-curricular work fits

Structured co-curricular leadership programming is not on the list, and it satisfies most of the conditions: it is sustained rather than one-off, built on peer interaction, produces a project and a public presentation of it, and generates precisely the reflective artifacts an ePortfolio is designed to hold.

Two list entries are also frequently run out of student affairs: service and community-based learning, and internship facilitation. Divisions doing either are already operating high-impact practices and often are not reporting them under that heading.

The measurement caveat that matters most

A practice benefits the students who reach it. Participation in high-impact practices is consistently uneven: commuter, part-time, working, online and first-generation students are underrepresented in exactly the practices that would help them most. Report participation by population alongside any outcome, or the finding describes access as much as impact.

See also student affairs assessment, co-curricular record, and our guide to measuring student outcomes.