A Quantitative Analysis of High Impact Practices and Civic Learning Outcomes among Community College Students

This study aims to answer the following research question: How is participation in selected high impact practices (HIPs) that promote social capital associated with community college students’ positive civic learning outcomes (CLOs) such as communication and listening, diversity, and consensus-building? This study analyzed responses to the 2019 Community College Survey of Student Engagement using Minitab to conduct chi-square analysis to test the hypothesis that HIPs that build social capital are related to greater frequency of CLOs. The most notable finding is that four of the HIPs—internships, in-class group projects, service-learning, and learning communities—were consistently positively associated with each of the CLOs in statistically significant and possibly practically meaningful ways