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Home / Faculty & Staff Resources / Office of Teaching and Learning / High Impact Practices (HIPs)

High Impact Practices (HIPs)

High Impact Practices (HIPs) are active learning strategies that promote deep learning and increase student engagement, especially for those traditionally most underserved by higher education (AAC&U, 2022). “Students who use these approaches tend to earn higher grades and retain, integrate, and transfer information at higher rates” (Kuh, 2008).

The AAC&U (2022) identifies 11 specific High Impact Practices:
  • First-year seminars and experiences
  • Common intellectual experiences (core experiences)
  • Learning communities
  • Writing-intensive courses
  • Collaborative assignments and courses
  • Undergraduate research and creative inquiry
  • Service-learning or community-based learning
  • Work-based learning, including internships
  • Capstones courses and projects
  • E-portfolios
  • Diversity/global learning


The AAC&U identifies 8 key elements of High Impact Practices:

  • Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels
  • Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time
  • Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters
  • Experiences with diversity, wherein students are exposed to and must contend with people and circumstances that differ from those with which students are familiar
  • Frequent, timely, and constructive feedback
  • Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning
  • Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications
  • Public demonstration of competence



Additional resources:

Office of Teaching and Learning

High Impact Practices (HIPs)

Yemisi Milledge, Ph.D.
Director of Experiential Learning

229-931-2024
yemisi.milledge@gsw.edu