In this article, the authors contribute to the conversation on High Impact Practice (HIPs) focusing on the connection between sense of accomplishment and what is high impact by discussing data from their study of signature assignments. Signature assignments are assignments within a single course or unit that give students choice, require synthesis…

Within the recent rise in the incorporation of contemplative practices in higher education, mindfulness stands out as the most studied and implemented practice. However, most of its studied implementations have been focused on interventions associated with mental health. Very little attention has been given to the study of mindfulness's…

This paper describes an advertising ethics course designed for first-year students of any major, written from the perspectives of both the course creator/instructor and the students who took the course and developed a workshop based around it. As educators, how do we help students learn and care about how their data is collected and used and…

We present an analysis on the differential effects of incentivizing homework in an introductory mathematics course at the United States Military Academy. We found that including homework as part of a student's overall course average (incentive) led to a significantly higher performance (achievement) on homework assignments. However, doing homework…

Studies examining writing as a High-Impact Education Practice (HIP) have focused primarily on writing in terms of major project assignments, thus directing attention away from the promising high impacts that low-stakes writing (LSW) assignments have on student learning. This study piloted assigning LSW in two MBA classes to test the extent to…

The purpose of this study was to explore the roles, perspectives, and actions of teachers and students for first-time-detained juvenile delinquents by examining a reading intervention for a student. Using an action research methodology, the reading intervention was explored within the broader context of the history and operations of the juvenile…

We explore the use of text message reminders to improve student performance. The effectiveness of text messaging reminders is examined by comparing two large sections of a course where students focused on personal branding. One section received deadline reminders by email, while the other section received opt-in text reminders. The results of the…

The author presents self-report data from students in three upper-level undergraduate courses to illustrate the comparative effectiveness of different out-of-class assessment approaches in promoting completion and comprehension of reading assignments. Students reported agreeing or strongly agreeing that all three assignments motivated them to…

The purpose of this article is to persuade English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers and teacher trainers that homework is indeed beneficial by presenting multiple examples of high-quality homework assignments, as Dettmers et al. (2010) found in mathematics. The argument here is that it is not the time spent on homework that matters in early…

Homework has been associated with a range of academic and cognitive benefits for secondary students. Research has also revealed that students' homework behaviours can vary with demographic traits. An important factor that may account for some of this variation is the role played by teachers and schools in homework allocation. It is hypothesised…

This paper examines the potential to foster "grit" and "growth mindset" in an undergraduate curriculum through the use of high-impact practices. [Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Northern Rocky Mountain Educational Research Association (NRMERA) (34th, 2016).]

This article details the principles and practices animating an "ethnographic" method of teaching social theory. As opposed to the traditional "survey" approach that aims to introduce students to the historical breadth of social thought, the primary objective of teaching ethnographically is to cultivate students as participant…

This study evaluated syllabi (N = 87) from introductory advertising and public relations courses to examine to what extent and how stated course goals and assignments signal the overall learning orientation of a course and which type of learning orientation--mastery or performance--was most common. Mastery orientations emphasize intrinsic rewards,…

The focus of this study is to investigate early childhood students' discourses of play-based curriculum. In this paper we focus on how students made implicit and explicit links to the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF). Twenty-six early childhood students had volunteered their de-identified play and pedagogy…

At the undergraduate level, considerable evidence exists to support the use of peer assessment, but there is less research at the graduate level. In the present study, we investigated student perception of the peer assessment experience and the ability of graduate students to provide feedback that is comparable to the instructor and that is…