Faculty Insights

Faculty Insights into High-Impact Practices

An image of a portion of the FSSE Tableau HIP dashboard showing a radar chart.

More HIP Exploration!

Curious for more? Use the FSSE-NSSE Tableau Dashboard to explore faculty views and involvement in HIPs alongside student participation data from NSSE. Query by institution characteristics and faculty demographics.

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Faculty are a critical component of many HIPs on campus. Faculty generally agree that HIPs are important, but the level of importance and extent to which faculty are involved in teaching and mentoring students in HIPs, varies.

Over 13,000 faculty from 94 diverse baccalaureate-granting institutions participated in the 2020 administration of the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), which included new items related to high-impact practices (HIPs). The survey asks faculty if they find it important that students participate in the following high-impact practices before they graduate: service-learning, learning communities, research with faculty, internships, study abroad, and culminating senior experiences. FSSE also now asks faculty about their involvement in all these HIPs. These data pair well with the responses from students who take NSSE.

FSSE Items about High-Impact Practices: Importance and Participation

How important is it to you that undergraduates at your institution do the following before they graduate?

Participate in an internship, co-op, field experience, student teaching, or clinical placement
Participate in a learning community or some other formal program where groups of students take two or more classes together
Participate in a study abroad program
Work with a faculty member on a research project
Complete a culminating senior experience (capstone course, senior project or thesis, portfolio, recital, comprehensive exam, etc.)
Participate in a community-based project (service-learning) as part of a course

Response options: Very important, Important, Somewhat important, Not important

During the current school year, have you participated in the following activities?

Supervising undergraduate internships or other field experiences
Supervising, mentoring, or teaching undergraduates in a learning community or some other formal program where groups of students take two or more classes
Supervising undergraduates in a study abroad program
Working with undergraduates on research
Mentoring or teaching undergraduates completing a culminating senior experience (capstone course, senior project or thesis, portfolio, recital, comprehensive exam, etc.)

Response options: Yes, No

About how many of your undergraduate courses at this institution have included a community-based project (service-learning)?

Response options: All, Most, Some, None

The Importance Faculty Place on Student HIP Participation

Looking at the HIPs that faculty believe are important for students tells a slightly different story than faculty involvement (Figure 2). In the aggregate, faculty placed the most importance on participating in internships (85%) and the least on study abroad (40%). Women (88%) placed the most importance on internships followed by men (83%), and non-binary (72%) faculty. Yet, non-binary (69%) faculty placed more importance on students participating in undergraduate research than their colleagues; this may demonstrate that non-binary faculty especially recognize the importance of these structured and mentored experiences. Disciplinary differences might be another of the reasons for the distinctions given research shows some academic areas tend to be predominately one gender or another as well as place differing values on specific HIPs.

Note: men n=4,724; women n=5,878; non-binary n=54; and we recognize non-binary can be a specific identity category, we use it here as a generalized umbrella term that describes persons who do not identify with normalized gender categories, similar to other scholars’ use of gender minority, gender variant, trans-spectrum, etc.

**Figure 7. Faculty Importance of HIPs by Gender Identity** Go to an accessible version of this figure: Faculty Importance of HIPs.

Faculty Involvement in HIPs

Across all HIPs, faculty most often include service-learning experiences in their courses and least often are involved in supervising study abroad programs. This pattern held consistent when analyzing faculty by gender identity, but some nuance existed. Women (58%) included service-learning experiences in their courses the most while men (52%) and non-binary (52%) faculty did so less frequently. Men (9%) supervised study abroad experiences the most, while supervisory rates were lower for women (7%) and non-binary (7%).

**Figure 8. Faculty Participation in HIPs by Gender Identity** Go to an accessible version of this figure: Faculty Participation in HIPs

Considering Faculty Perceptions and Involvement in HIPs with Student Participation

Viewing data collected from faculty (FSSE) alongside data from students (NSSE) allows institutions to examine how faculty perceptions and involvement in HIPs relate to actual student participation. For example, of the faculty who believe undergraduate participation in internships to be more important, 2 in 5 supervise internships and the rate of student participation is 52% for seniors. Of the faculty who believe undergraduate participation in internships to be less important, 1 in 5 supervise internships and the rate of student participation is 46% for seniors. These relationships clearly demonstrate the association of faculty perceptions of importance and students’ participation.

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Faculty Insights