“Going Virtual Helped Me Learn That I Can Handle Everything”: Campus Magazine Production as a High Impact Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This case study documents a large, 4-year university magazine’s transition to virtual instruction during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using theoretical frameworks from Kuh’s work on high impact practices (HIPs), this analysis offers empirical evidence that virtual student newsrooms may provide impactful learning experiences during crisis situations. Based on interviews, surveys, and newsroom observation, 23 magazine staff members reported improvements in their professional self-efficacy as they overcame logistics challenges and interpersonal hurdles similar to working media professionals. The case study also identifies strengths and weaknesses of crisis pedagogy. Implications for post-pandemic pedagogy and course planning are discussed.

Gaining Confidence, Experience, and Knowledge as Researchers among Undergraduate Sociology Students

Advanced undergraduate students struggle with executing complete research projects that involve data collection and analysis. Research indicates that engaging in undergraduate research is a high-impact practice. The American Sociological Association recommends that sociology majors engage in research beyond their research methods and statistics courses. We used a pre-/post-assessment model across three semesters in all upper-level undergraduate sociology courses at our institution. The assessment measured confidence, knowledge, and experience with research methods. Fifty-eight students completed at least one pre-/post-assessment pair. Of those, 27 students completed two pre-/post-assessments. No students completed three pre-/post-assessments. We find that experience and confidence had statistically significant increases at each survey point. Knowledge increased but was statistically significant for only two groups: the full sample on the first post-assessment (N = 58) and the students with two assessment pairs on their second post-assessment (N = 27) who participated across two semesters.

Honors College Faculty Support for High-Impact Practice Participation

Much of the existing research on honors colleges or programs is focused on the student experience, with less information offered concerning the faculty perspective. This study presents findings from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), comparing support for high-impact practices between faculty who teach honors courses and those who do not. Along with core FSSE items, this study uses responses from 1,487 faculty members at 15 institutions on two experimental items about teaching honors courses. A series of ordinary least squares and binary logistic regression analyses suggest that faculty who teach honors courses are more likely to supervise undergraduates on research and internships and to think that it is important for students to participate in learning communities, study abroad, and research with faculty. These findings are interpreted within the context of previous research and current theory, bridging knowledge from the fields of higher education and gifted education.

The Impact of Applied Research: Student Research as a High Impact Practice in Freshman Environmental Science

Non-STEM-majors in a freshman elective Science course, Environmental Science 1, were given the opportunity to identify a research question using the course objectives as a guideline. Their research questions and investigations served to fulfill the lab component of the course in lieu of a lab manual. Students were asked to choose a question of interest that could be researched on campus. Student partnerships were encouraged, and a class of 17 students produced 11 research projects. Frequent interactions with the Instructor and peers resulted in lively discussions, new questions, and high levels of student engagement and performance. This approach to laboratory work in a non-science major course can be duplicated when access to resources and instructor/student ratio allows.

Undergraduate Research as System

This study examines the written and visual results of a participatory systems-mapping process used to explore undergraduate research at a large, public research university in the United States. With the university’s transition to a high-impact practice model, the institutional value of undergraduate research has increased, but challenges remain in implementing the practice equitably and inclusively, especially in the complex environment of higher education. The systems-mapping process reveals the subtle, often conflicting dynamics that underlie the undergraduate research enterprise, while simultaneously supporting the emergence of a shared vision, or story, of what the undergraduate research experience could be.

The Impact of Continual Reflection Students as Partners: Becoming a/r/tographers

In this reflective essay we chronicle working together from fall 2017 through spring of 2020 to discover what Rita Irwin (2013) delineated as “becoming a/r/tography” (p. 198). Our goals are to delineate how undergraduate research as a high impact practice effected the experience of an undergraduate art and design major as she matriculated through the “sticky curriculum” (Orr & Shreeve, 2018, p. 5), and how a/r/tography as a research methodology influenced our collaborative creativity research projects during this three-year period.

Using IRB Protocols to Teach Ethical Principles for Research and Everyday Life

Undergraduate research as a high-impact practice demonstrates many positive benefits for students, but little research has delved into the impact of ethical training for research, in particular submitting Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols to determine if the study meets ethical standards for the treatment of human subjects. This study explored if students in two experimental and one nonexperimental research methods class benefited from increased knowledge of research ethics and how to apply them in daily-life situations if they participated in various aspects of IRB protocol procedures either as part of a class-based research project or by completing an IRB protocol activity for developing a hypothetical program to help families. Some students in all three classes had previously engaged in a 4-hr online extended training [the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program] in research ethics focused on the Belmont Report principles of beneficence, respect, and justice, but not in IRB protocols. Students were given a pre- and posttest to assess knowledge in both research and daily-life settings for applying the Belmont Report research ethics principles. Results indicate students gained greater knowledge of research ethics when they completed IRB protocol training during a class-based undergraduate research or program-design project, even if they had already completed some extended case-based training in the CITI Program. Results are discussed in terms of the value of using modified IRB protocol approaches as a high-impact practice to teach ethics in research and daily life to students.

Stories of Impact: The Transformative Power of Undergraduate Research

We, along with being guest editors of this issue, are also active researchers in our respective disciplines and the scholarship of teaching and learning. We integrate undergraduate research (UGR) as High Impact Practice (HIP) in most of our research projects, and have personal experiences in which we see all the benefits come to life that have been outlined in the series of papers in this issue. As we read abstracts and considered the organization and content for this issue, we began to notice a pattern in some of the abstracts that aligned with our own work and discussions with colleagues, but is generally not present in a traditional scholarly article. That element is the personal narrative account of impact. We know from the extensive literature cited throughout this issue, as well as the work in this section, that providing high-quality undergraduate research projects has substantial impacts at many levels – for individual students, for cohorts, for departments, colleges, universities, and even systems. We, as scholars, see these impacts every day in our own work and the work of others. However, it is not often captured in peer-reviewed research outside of quotes to support evidence of assessment results (which of course, have their own important place in this work).