High-Impact Learning at the California Institute of Advanced Management

What Is High-Impact Learning?

We have been an advocate for high-impact practices in higher education since our opening in 2011. High-impact learning occurs when students are actively engaged in the best educational practices that allow them to apply their learning to their personal and work lives. High-impact teaching strategies allow students to perform better in their courses, earn their degrees faster, and improve engagement in their education.

High-impact teaching strategies require students to actively solve problems, work collaboratively in a community of peers, experience real-world applications of knowledge, and reflect on their learning processes. According to George Kuh (2008), several educational experiences are conducive to high-impact learning, including:

• Common intellectual experiences (such as our core curriculum)
• Learning communities
• Writing-intensive courses
• Collaborative assignments and projects
• Diversity and global learning in courses or programs that examine “difficult differences”
• Service- and community-based learning
• Internships
• Capstone courses and projects
  
  

Kuh also identifies six common elements across high-impact practices:

• Requires student effort and commitment to learning
• Helps students build substantive relationships with peers and faculty
• Helps students engage with one another across differences, thus challenging students to develop new ways of thinking and responding to new people and situations
• Provides students with rich, useful feedback, helping them to see feedback as a tool for growth and improvement
• Helps students apply what they are learning and adapt the information to new situations
• Affords students the opportunity to self-reflect and become aware of themselves as a person, and encourages lifelong learning

When instructors use these high-impact practices in higher education, research has shown increased rates of student retention, student engagement, and persistence to graduation for all students across diverse backgrounds.

CIAM’s High-Impact Teaching Strategies