The Rewards and Challenges of High-Impact Practices
Posted: September 13, 2023 by Melissa E. Schindler
Editor's Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts in which past LEAP Action Grant recipients report on their projects.
Melissa E. Schindler is an Assistant Professor of English and a 2022 LEAP Action Grant recipient.
At the tail end of the 2021 academic year, I found myself on the road from Cumming to Dahlonega to meet with Dr. Erin N. Bush, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy. Despite our shared academic interests, Dr. Bush and I had never met. In fact, we'd never even heard of one another until Allison Galloup, Associate Professor and Special Collections and Digital Initiatives Librarian, suggested that I reach out to Dr. Bush for some assistance with a digital assignment. Such is the nature of a multi-campus institution: sometimes it takes a librarian on the Gainesville campus to instigate a teaching collaboration between a professor in Cumming and a professor in Dahlonega.
Indeed, the distance between the campuses would become a major focus of our collaborative teaching and research. On that day in May, we began our conversation with a discussion about approaches to digital history—one of Dr. Bush's areas of expertise. I explained to her that, for three years, I'd been leading students in historical research on Forsyth County. In my classes, students would visit a cemetery, select a resident buried there, and conduct genealogical and historical research to piece together a story from that person's life. After repeating this assignment over several semesters, I was increasingly interested in finding a platform for my students' research so that more people in the region could access it. My hope for the meeting with Dr. Bush was that she might point me toward some accessible platforms where students could make their work public.
As the conversation went on, however, a bigger idea took hold. Dr. Bush and I began to brainstorm approaches to collaborative student research. We realized that students in an English 1101 course would not have the time to research, contextualize, and publish digital history projects on their own. But if students in different classes—on different campuses and from different years—worked together, then they could produce collaborative research focused on our local region.
I should pause here to note the importance of researching the history of our local region. Representations of the rural South and Appalachia in popular media are often limited and frequently reinforce stereotypes. Studies show that students are more engaged and motivated in research when they know that their work is original and they feel connected to their local context (Morais, 2018).
Dr. Bush and I hypothesized that having UNG students conduct original research about our local North Georgia community would result in a more engaging educational experience, complicate their understanding of the rural South, and help students feel more connected to the region (one of the five goals of the UNG Strategic Plan). What's more, students rarely have the opportunity to participate in this type of research until they take 3000-level courses. By extending this research project to students in first-year courses, we would enable students to experience a high-impact practice very early in their studies.
"High-impact practices" (or HIPs) are methods of active learning that foster critical thinking. The idea is that when students are more actively involved in the learning process, they're more likely to learn and persist through degree completion. The term was popularized in higher education research by George D. Kuh in 2008. Since then, HIPs have become, well, hip. There are HIP workshops, programs, and academies. Some universities (including UNG) mark courses that offer HIP experiences and others even require all students to complete a series of HIP-centered courses as part of their degree programs.
Thus, Dr. Bush and I began to imagine how a collaborative research project could promote HIPs not just in our courses but across UNG. Over the next six months, we planned a two-stage research project. We decided that students in my English 1102 course would begin the project by researching a resident in Forsyth County and writing an essay about that person. At the end of five weeks, my students would hand off their research to students in Dr. Bush's History 3105 course (The Gilded Age and Progressive Era). Dr. Bush's students would take the case studies and use what they'd learned about the time period to provide context for the research. Then, her students would develop digital exhibits about local history using a platform called Omeka. During the entire ten-week project, our students would participate in asynchronous digital learning communities.
As we developed this joint curriculum in anticipation of the Spring 2022 semester, we soon recognized that our project was unique. For one thing, it involved multiple HIPs: collaborative assignments, learning communities, undergraduate research, and writing-intensive curricula. Even more special was the fact that we were teaching this project across two campuses in a multi-campus institution. As far as we could tell, no research had looked at HIPs at multi-campus or merger institutions. We knew that we had the opportunity to conduct new and exciting research on teaching and learning. Guided by experts from the SoTL Academy and supported by a UNG Presidential Innovation Award, we piloted our curriculum and collected data on student experiences for most of the Spring 2022 semester.
And boy, did the data say a lot!
With additional support from the English Department, the HAP Department, and a LEAP Action Grant, we were able to hire an undergraduate research assistant and a graduate research assistant (Miranda Cunard and Savannah Whitman, respectively). Working as a team over the summer and into the fall, we analyzed and reanalyzed the data.
The results were both surprising and predictable. On the one hand, we had set out to compare student reactions to two of the HIPs: (local) undergraduate research and collaborative learning. Based on our previous teaching experiences, we expected one group of students to be more motivated by the collaborative learning and the other to be more excited about the local research. What we found, however, was that all students were most motivated by novelty. For the English students, visiting a cemetery and a historical society was novel. They viewed these off-campus learning opportunities as dramatically different from their typical experiences in both high school and college. Meanwhile, the history students were most excited about learning to use Omeka, the digital platform. They were enthusiastic about learning a new skill and reported that they grew through the productive stress of grappling with a new challenge. Both groups were most engaged by the part of the research that they saw as novel and hands-on.
Let's be clear: learning to use Omeka is not easy. Neither is writing someone's life story from a handful of census records, a gravestone engraving, and a newspaper article. Both parts of the research required students to spend more time than they would on a typical assignment. Yet despite the additional time required for these activities, they reported higher engagement with these novel active-learning experiences.
Therefore, our research indicated that it may not be the high-impact practice alone that motivated our students. Instead, it was the excitement of trying something new. After all, we expected more students to be motivated by the chance to discuss their research with students on other campuses, but they weren't. (Sidenote: Other variables may explain this lack of interest, including pandemic-induced virtual technology fatigue.)
Although our study has some limitations, we gained three important insights into what motivates students. First, students are motivated by novel experiences. Second, high impact-practices are not equally impactful. Learning communities for students at a multi-campus institution may not be practical, and the work of keeping up with them digitally may outweigh the benefits students receive from participating in them. HIPs must be tailored to an institution. Finally, there is hidden labor in high-impact practices for students and faculty. On average, Dr. Bush and I spent 4-5 additional hours every week administering the joint research experience. What's more, regardless of their excitement about the novel assignments, students still had to carve out extra time to complete them. High-impact practices have benefits, but we need space and support to implement them.
In recent years, scholars have begun to interrogate higher education's uncritical embrace of HIPs (Johnson and Stage, 2018). Although Dr. Bush and I agree that HIPs are valuable for UNG students, our teaching and research also suggest that HIPs are not a blanket solution to the issues facing higher education. They are not "one size fits all" and must be adapted to the institution, the campus, and sometimes even the class. As Kuh and Kinzie argue, "simply offering and labeling an activity a HIP does not necessarily guarantee that students who participate in it will benefit in the ways much of the extant literature claims" (2018). Some of the most effective HIP initiatives are tailored to an institution, supported by strong infrastructure, and spread throughout students' plans of study. Meanwhile, faculty need not overhaul their syllabi to implement every HIP possible. Instead, we can try to figure out how to make learning experiences new to our students. In the process, we may also discover ways to make the material novel to ourselves, too.