MRU Institute for SoTL

Recent publications on Learning Statistics and Reading Academic Texts

Congrats to April McGrath and Margy MacMillan who recently published articles on their Nexen projects:

  • MacMillan, M. (2014) Student connections with academic texts: A phenomenographic study of reading. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(8), 943-954.
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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 1:  Janice introduces the presenters and a brief description of the Taxonomy of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Questions.

 http://youtu.be/aCu8SnbPRKs

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.

Part 3: Margy MacMillan, Professor, Library discusses her project about student reading of scholarly articles, how she used a phenomenographic approach to analyze how students make connections between the text and their existing knowledge, and what she learned about their reading.
Part 4:  April McGrath, Assistant Professor, Psychology describes how she used an experimental design to see how a “learning check-in” (structured one-on-one appointment) could increase student engagement and success in a research methods class, and also how she uncovered useful information about the course topics that students were struggling with.
Part 5:  Melanie Rathburn, Associate Professor, Biology and General Education talks about how she investigated strategies to reduce student anxiety about science and math in her general education courses using surveys and reflective writing, and how she determined that making the content relevant to the students and giving them opportunities to reflect, were important strategies.
Part 6:  Janice Miller-Young, Director, Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, discusses her insights about how students visualize three-dimensional structures from two-dimensional textbook diagrams, which she gained through using a think-aloud interview protocol triangulated with data from students’ coursework.
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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.

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