Foreword from Ensuring Quality & Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale
Foreword by Carol Geary Schneider, President, Association of American Colleges and Universities
Debra Humphreys Vice President for Policy and Public Engagement, Association of American Colleges and Universities

As part of the Association of American Colleges and Universities' (AAC&U) centennial initiative, Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP), we are pleased to publish another report in our series on educational practices that successfully prepare today's college students to meet twenty-first century challenges.

LEAP is a national initiative launched in 2005 that now involves hundreds of private and public colleges, universities, and community colleges; several consortia; and eight formal partnerships with state systems of higher education. LEAP engages the public with core questions about what really matters in college, works to give students a compass to guide their learning, and makes the aims and outcomes of a liberal education—including broad knowledge, intellectual and practical skills, personal and social responsibility, and integrative learning—the expected framework for excellence at all levels of education. The LEAP initiative also strives to "make excellence inclusive" and is especially concerned with students who, historically, have been underserved by higher education.

This new LEAP report builds from the ground-breaking and bestselling research report by George D. Kuh, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, published in 2008. That publication probed the insights and evidence initially articulated by the LEAP National Leadership Council in its 2007 signature report, College Learning for the New Global Century. In an appendix to that report, Kuh and AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider identified a set of teaching and learning practices that had been widely implemented and that had shown evidence of effectiveness in fostering completion, higher levels of achievement on key learning outcomes, or both. They noted, however, that "on almost all campuses, these practices remain optional rather than essential" (AAC&U 2007, 53). The practices identified include firstyear seminars and experiences, learning communities, service learning, undergraduate research, internships, capstone projects, and more. (See Appendix C for a fuller description of the high-impact educational practices.)

Subsequently, using several years of data reported by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), Kuh and his NSSE colleagues demonstrated a high degree of correlation between student participation in these recommended practices and students' NSSE self-reported gains on key outcomes of high-quality learning. In his 2008 report on this research, Kuh made a strong argument for why colleges, community colleges, and universities of all sorts should take a second look at these practices—now demonstrated to be "high-impact"—and figure out a way to make them expected rather than optional. Kuh noted as well that NSSE data showed a compelling extra benefit for students in groups that often have fared poorly in higher education—selected minorities and students with lower test scores.

When it was first published, Kuh's report on High-Impact Practices touched a nerve and produced a groundswell of interest in the higher education community. This follow-up report makes clear, however, that we still have a long way to go before the kinds of effortful, active learning that characterize these practices become the norm rather than the exception on college campuses.

That said, it also is true that in 2013, many more educators understand the need to move from "boutique" programs that provide these kinds of high-impact practices for selected students to new curricular pathways that provide multiple, scaffolded encounters with high-impact practices for all students. AAC&U currently is working, through several grant-funded projects, with many broadaccess campuses, two-year and four-year, to accelerate the incorporation of these high-impact practices in what we call the "unavoidable curriculum," both face-to-face and online. The evidence is compelling, we believe, that when students are actively engaged in forms of learning that move students' own effortful work to the center, they are more likely to complete college and more likely to achieve the intellectual capacities that democracy needs and the economy rewards.

Ken O'Donnell, the coauthor of this new report, Ensuring Quality and Taking High-Impact Practices to Scale, takes us inside these pace-setting efforts to make student involvement in high-impact practices expected rather than optional. He speaks for a reform-minded generation of higher education leaders and faculty members who have energetically engaged with the idea of, and research about, high-impact practices as a coherent body of work that has the potential—taken as a whole—to redefine the component elements of quality in higher education. But practitioners involved in these initiatives also have noted significant challenges: (1) how can we be sure that particular courses, programs, or curricula that seem to fall within the definitions of these proven practices are truly of high quality? and (2) how, exactly, can we bring these practices to scale even in the midst of constrained resources and resistance to significant curricular change?

We are very pleased to offer in this publication at least some preliminary answers to those questions, as well as both current data on the level of student participation in high-impact practices and new data on their benefits. In addition to the essays by Kuh and O'Donnell, this report features five case studies of institutions that have made significant curricular changes to bring high-impact practices to scale.

In 2013, AAC&U also will release two other publications related to high-impact educational practices. These include Investing in Success: Cost-Effective Strategies to Increase Student Success by Jane Wellman and Rima Brusi and Assessing High-Impact Learning for Underserved Students by Ashley Finley and Tia McNair.

We hope that this family of studies and examples will help you ensure that all college students will reap the benefits of an engaging and rigorous twenty-first-century liberal education.