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.