Early bird registration for Banff Symposium on SoTL closes Oct 10!
Banff Symposium on SoTL, Nov 6-8 2014
Pre-conference workshops and concurrent sessions range from exploring both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies to dissemination of SoTL work in courses across the curriculum and from a broad range of disciplines.
http://isotlsymposium.mtroyal.ca/registration.html
Keynotes:
Vive la différence! Deploying Disciplinary Knowledge in Collaborative Work
Sherry Lee Linkon, Georgetown University
Professor of English, Director of Writing Curriculum Initiatives
Seeing Red, Telling Time, and Catalyzing Change
Peter Mahaffy, The King’s University College
Professor of Chemistry, Co-Director of King’s Centre for Visualization in Science, 3M National Teaching Fellow
Conversations Within Communities of Practice
Gladys Sterenberg, Kevin O’Connor, and Ranee Drader, Mount Royal University
Professors of Education; Undergrad. Research Assistant
What Students Want you to Know about Conducting SoTL Research
Ranee Drader (Education & Schooling), Kyle Kinaschuk (major: English; minor: Philosophy), Ana Sepulveda (Science), Mount Royal University
Recent publications on Learning Statistics and Reading Academic Texts
Congrats to April McGrath and Margy MacMillan who recently published articles on their Nexen projects:
- McGrath, April L. (2014) Content, Affective, and Behavioral Challenges to Learning: Students’ Experiences Learning Statistics, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 8(2).
- MacMillan, M. (2014) Student connections with academic texts: A phenomenographic study of reading. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(8), 943-954.
An interdisciplinary, international collaboration about teaching Community Service Learning courses
Above, left to right: Janice Miller-Young (Institute for SoTL), Yasmin Dean (Social Work), Judy Gleeson (Nursing), Victoria Clavert (Bissett School of Business), Patti Clayton (Indiana Univeristy – Purdue University Indianapolis), Melanie Rathburn (Biology), Roberta Lexier (General Education), Margot Underwood (Nursing)
This faculty research group is collaborating with leading scholar Dr. Patti Clayton to conduct a self-study of faculty learning when teaching with the challenging pedagogy “Community Service Learning”. They have conducted a series of interviews about reciprocity in their international service-learning courses and will work over the 2014-15 academic year to analyze them, place their findings within the existing literature, and ultimately produce a paper. However, we are finding the benefits of this work to be as much about process as outcome (the sharing of stories, as well as group analysis and writing are all part of the learning process). Preliminary findings are being presented at the prestigious IARSLCE conference:
- Decoding Ourselves: faculty thinking about reciprocity in global service learning courses, International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement, Tulane University, Sept. 2014.
We anticipate that by getting this interdisciplinary community together, other collaborative projects about student learning will grow out of it in the future. Currently, I-SoTL is also sponsoring one SoTL-CSL research project in General Education (Rathburn and Lexier).
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!!
Reminder: Developing a SoTL Research Question presentation
Reminder: The next topic in our SoTL Exchange Presentation Series:
Developing a SoTL Research question
Presented by: Margy MacMillan, April McGrath, Janice Miller-Young, Melanie Rathburn, and Glen Ryland
Thursday, Nov 21 at noon in Y324
This group presentation will survey a range of types of SoTL questions, then presenters will each describe one of their SoTL projects in terms of how it was conceived, what methodologies and sources of evidence were used, plus findings and impact. There will be time for discussion and our intent is that anyone interested in learning about SoTL or thinking about developing a SoTL inquiry will find this presentation useful and engaging.
Hope to see you there!
Reading Through Connections: A phenomenographic study of student connections to scholarly text.
Thanks to Margy for sharing information about her presentation at the ISSoTL 2013 conference in Raleigh, NC earlier this month. Margy received a Going Public Award for presenting this work:
The presentation focused on findings of the project which illuminated how students were reading a text while making connections.
Presentation: http://www2.mtroyal.ca/~mmacmillan/conf/ISSOTLreadingconnections.pptx
Handout: http://www2.mtroyal.ca/~mmacmillan/conf/issotl13.docx
Margy’s summary:
The presentation outlined a research project that sought to understand how students could connect their prior knowledge/experience to reading an academic article in their field. As making connections while reading is a central part of academic practice which is often unseen, and unknown to students, but which faculty expect them to do as part of their academic reading, I wanted to know what kinds of connections students could make to an academic text. Student responses to an in-class activity were analyzed using a phenomenographic approach.
While I found that students could and did make connections to both academic and personal knowledge, a more significant finding was that the connections revealed how students were reading the text and their varying focus between words and meaning. Some connections revealed a surface reading of the text while other demonstrated a deeper understanding of the meaning behind the words. These deeper connections provided evidence of deeper reading and understanding through the creation of analogies, through integration with professional practice and through critique of the article as an artifact of communication.
Free article: SoTL Scholars’ Identity Development
The recently published article, Conflicts and Configurations in a Liminal Space: SoTL Scholars’ Identity Development, is the free sample for the 2nd issue of Teaching and Learning Inquiry, so anyone can access this article. MRU’s Karen Manarin is one of the co-authors.
In it, the authors describe how “navigating among conflicting identities can lead us into a troublesome but deeply reflective liminal space, prompting profound realizations and the reconstruction of our academic identities.” Thanks to the authors for helping to normalise the sometimes “unsettling” experience of engaging in SoTL!
Nicola Simmons, Earle Abrahamson, Jessica M. Deshler, Barbara Kensington-Miller, Karen Manarin, Sue Morón-García, Carolyn Oliver and Joanna Renc-Roe
Teaching & Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal
Vol. 1, No. 2, Special Issue: Writing Without Borders: 2013 International Writing Collaborative / Guest Editors: Mick Healey and Beth Marquis (2013) (pp. 9-21)
IJ-SoTL Vol.7 No.2 is online
The new July 2013 issue of IJ-SoTL, published by the CTLS at Georgia Southern University, is now available online.
Note: It also includes a reader’s response from MRU’s April McGrath on describing and analyzing quantitative data!
Short- and long-term effects of cumulative finals on student learning
The following are excerpts from an interesting study which was recently highlighted in the Teaching Professor:
Khanna, M. M., Badura Brack, A. S., and Finken, L. L. (2013). Short- and long-term effects of cumulative finals on student learning. Teaching of Psychology, 40 (3), 175-182.
Mean scores on content exams versus a cumulative final were compared in introductory psych sections and upper-division psychology sections. The finding: “[C]lasses taking cumulative finals performed reliably better than classes who had noncumulative finals.” (p. 177)
Retention of course material was also measured using online content exams for courses taken one, two, and three semesters previously. “Regardless of type of course, students with cumulative finals did better on departmental content tests than students in courses with noncumulative exams. …” (p. 180)
“As a result of these findings, we believe using cumulative finals improves student learning, and we encourage instructors to utilize cumulative finals in their courses… [E]ven in our optimal study condition (immediate content exam administration in upper-division courses with cumulative finals) students only answered 82% of the content exam items correctly. In the worst condition (18 month time lag for introductory psychology courses with noncumulative finals), students retained just over half of the important information from introductory psychology.” (p. 180)