Invitation to participate in a study re: SoTL and Academic Identity
Earle Abrahamson (University of East London) and Karen Manarin (Mount Royal University, Canada) would like to invite you to participate in a brief survey about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and academic identity.
The information gathered will be used to consider a conceptual model around knowledge and knowing within a SoTL framework. The majority of questions require short answers, and the survey should take around 20 minutes to complete. The survey itself is anonymous, and in any dissemination, we will ensure that you cannot be identified by any information provided. At the end of the survey, you will be asked if you would be interested in being contacted for a follow-up interview.
All questions have been reviewed and approved by the Mount Royal Human Research Ethics Board and the University of East London University Ethics Research Committee. If you have any questions concerning your rights as a possible participant in this research, please contact the Research Compliance Officer, at Mount Royal University, 403-440-8470, herb<at>mtroyal.ca. Completion and submission of the survey implies that consent has been given.
If you would like to participate, please complete the survey on TooFast by February 28, 2014. Click on the following link to go to the survey.
Developing a SoTL Question
These video presentations from an October SoTL Exchange presentation at MRU have been waiting for a website redesign to find a permanent home, but in the meantime, you can also find them here! In this series, 6 SoTL scholars talk about what got them interested in their question, their data sources and/or methodology, and their findings and impact, including how their inquiry informed their teaching.
Part 2: Glen Ryland, Assistant Professor, General Education discusses how he developed and analyzed his SoTL question about what sources and strategies students draw upon as they are developing as academic writers in general education.
Special Issue: Doing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Measuring Systematic Changes to Teaching and Improvements in Learning
There is a new resource for SoTL that has just been published by New Directions for Teaching and Learning:
The book is written primarily by psychologists and, as you might expect from the title, they define SoTL as “an instructor asking questions about the impact of his/her teaching on students’ learning in an individual course”. This is a narrow definition, however they clearly and thoroughly address research design considerations for these types of studies (there is, however, an absence of theory). The chapters on designing SoTL studies take an empirical and quantitative perspective, addressing issues such as construct and internal validity, different types of comparisons (between participants, within participants, pre-test/post-test) and different experimental and quasi-experimental research designs . For any faculty member planning to do such a comparison study to assess a teaching intervention (or “treatment”, to use their language), Chapters 2, 3 & 4 are excellent resources to help you design your study.
Bartsch, R. A. (2013), Designing SoTL Studies—Part I: Validity. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2013: 17–33. doi: 10.1002/tl.20073
*If you’re new to SoTL and are considering an experimental design for your project, you may also want to read Fallacies of SoTL: Rethinking How We Conduct Our Research, Chapter 8 in The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning In and Across the Disciplines (I have a copy in my office if you’d like to borrow it.)
Back to NDTL: There are also two very useful chapters on writing which are quite applicable to a range of disciplines:
The Chapter on “Navigating the IRB” (Institutional Review Board) is quite American and there are better resources available for our Canadian context (see my summary here).
There is also a Chapter on Faculty Development Centres and the Role of SoTL, and I was happy to note a shout-out to MRU’s Nexen Scholar’s Program!!