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About IMPACT
Learn about our history and our framework.
Launched by the Office of the Provost in 2011 and named as a Purdue Moves initiative by the Office of the President in 2013, IMPACT is a large, collaborative program serving the Purdue West Lafayette and Indianapolis campuses. Since 2011, the team has run 25 IMPACT Semester cohorts and 4 IMPACT Week cohorts, a condensed, remote IMPACT experience that was created in 2022.
IMPACT was awarded a First in the World grant from the United States Department of Education entitled Success through Transformative Education and Active Mentoring (STEAM). Through the use of experimental and control sections, this project aimed to empirically demonstrate that a more student-centered learning environment leads to benefits such as greater learning, higher grades, and higher rates of student retention in the major and the university.
IMPACT was a large influence on the creation of the Wimeth Active Learning Center (WALC) in 2017, providing faculty and students with 27 active learning classrooms.
The IMPACT program is guided by a strong theoretical framework, which has been validated and used in several research projects for the past 40 years.
Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2017) is a motivational theory that posits the existence of three basic psychological needs, which when fulfilled, contribute to the creation of a student-centered, autonomy-supportive learning environment.
The creation of a student-centered, autonomy-supportive learning environment fosters student engagement and student competence, and an increased attainment of course-specific learning outcomes, degree completion, retention, and graduation rates.
Autonomy
The feelings of volition and choice; endorsement of behavior, ownership of the learning process.
Competence
The extent to which students believe they have mastered content material or are able to perform academically.
Relatedness
The need to feel belongingness and connectedness with others and the material presented in class, also termed relevance.
Outcomes, Recognition, and Scholarship
Over
575
instructor participants
Over
550
courses transformed
100%
of colleges at Purdue have participated in IMPACT
Over
90%
of undergraduates take an IMPACT course during their time at Purdue
Over
80%
of students rate their IMPACT course as highly student-centered
IMPACT has gained national notoriety through recent publications and has received interest near and far from instructors and universities wanting to participate, collaborate, and mimic the effectiveness of the program model.
The IMPACT program was chosen as a 2018 Innovator in the Chronicle of Higher Education and has been featured by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA) and Change Magazine.
Years of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) publications have come out of IMPACT, from the faculty, staff, and researchers involved. Please learn more from the archives below.
IMPACT Team
The IMPACT program is an integrated, institutional effort supported by the collaboration of faculty and staff across multiple units at Purdue.