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!!
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!