University of Georgia

The scholarship of teaching and learning goes beyond scholarly teaching and involves the systematic study of teaching and/or learning and the public sharing and review of such work through presentations or publications.

– McKinney, 2004

The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at The University of Georgia provides campus-wide leadership by promoting, fostering, and supporting an engaged community around the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) with the purpose of improving student learning. The CTL promotes scholarly teaching and research through a broad-based range of initiatives that will meet the needs of SoTL researchers at all levels of experience.

SoTL Resources & Tools

Ready to begin your own SoTL study? Or maybe you are wondering if SoTL is right for you? Keep reading for hand-picked resources and step-by-step instructions to help you out.

General Resources for Conducting SoTL Studies

These books and webpages offer excellent guidance on conducting SoTL studies:

Research Questions About Teaching

When thinking about a SoTL study, consider what “problem” you have been facing. While we usually think of problems in teaching as something to be ashamed of or hide from others, problems in SoTL are the foundation for intellectual inquiry into the complex, dynamic and often uncertain processes of teaching and learning. This inquiry becomes the basis for SoTL study and the reason we share our work publicly for peer review. Randy Bass discusses this fundamental shift in the culture and discourse surrounding teaching in his foundational SoTL article, “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?”

Searching the Literature

SoTL projects are always situated in what we know about teaching and learning as well as the discipline.

Search terms

It’s good practice to try many different search terms related to your area of inquiry, framework for teaching and learning, or methodology in order to find relevant literature. Moreover, trying search terms at different levels of specificity may be helpful. For example, searching the database ERIC for the term “active learning” yields results with an incredible range of foci: faculty perceptions of active learning, the impact of active learning on student teachers’ competence, how to get active in large lectures, whether peer interaction is necessary for active learning. So narrowing your focus can help you find more relevant literature. A few ways to narrow your focus are:

  • Type of pedagogy
  • Target audience (e.g., undergraduates, first generation college students, etc.)
  • Discipline
  • Type of educational institution
  • Qualifiers (e.g., benefits, challenges, obstacles, efficacy, effectiveness, significant difference)
  • Methodology (e.g., qualitative, survey research, think-alouds)

While narrowing your focus is helpful, avoid getting too narrow. Many studies done in different disciplines might be useful to your study.

Of course, the best method to finding relevant literature is to pour over the reference lists from articles that you have found that are relevant to your area of inquiry, methodology, or framework for teaching and learning.

See the UGA Libraries/CTL Research Guide for guidance on database searching, SoTL and higher ed journals, and books on SoTL.

Healey & Healey (2023) have evaluated search strategies in the two articles below. Below are podcast summaries of each article from 60-Second SoTL, created by the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University:

Part I podcast: https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/searching-for-sotl-literature/

Healey, M., & Healey, R. L. (2023). Searching the literature on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): An academic literacies perspective: Part 1. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 11. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.11.4

Part II podcast: https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/sotl-literature-reviews/

Healey, M., & Healey, R. L. (2023). Reviewing the literature on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): An academic literacies perspective: Part 2. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 11. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.11.5

Designing Your Study

Study design also answers the who, when, where and what of your SoTL study. Many of these answers depend on your research question, but here are a few questions to ask yourself:

  • Will data from one semester suffice, or will you need two semesters? It doesn’t need to last all semester; a few classes may be all that is needed to meet your instructional goal, or perhaps just one afternoon of focus groups.
  • Do I need to collect data from all students? Especially when you are interested in why students are struggling with a concept, idea, or skill, it might be more useful to target particular students for data collection.
  • How often, and at what points, is optimal to collect data for my research question? You must balance your need for data with respect for your students’ time and energy. This is why many SoTL researchers collect and analyze assignments the students are already producing in the course. Also consider that collecting data on learning immediately after students have been taught tells a different story than collecting it a week, or even 8 weeks, later.
  • How can I remain ethical in my study design? See the next step, considering Ethics and IRB in SoTL.
Ethics and IRB for SoTL

Being ethical in SoTL work means proactively making sure that your human subjects—your students—don’t feel forced to participate in your study because their grade or relationship with you might suffer if they do not participate, that students aren’t missing out on what we believe to be best for their learning,and that they are fully aware of any risks or benefits of participation.

It also means that you are confident that any risks associated with participation in the research are mitigated and any potential benefits from the study outweigh the risks. To help you navigate those questions, most institutions have their own IRB.

IRB = Institutional Review Board. This is the research oversight committee charged with ensuring that human subjects research is conducted ethically. Each research institution typically has one. At UGA, they are a part of the Human Subjects Office, which is part of the Office of Research. They hold IRB meetings monthly and welcome emails to [email protected].

The decision about whether you need IRB approval is best handled by the IRB office. Therefore, you should submit your study for review and let them make the determination whether their approval is needed to conduct the study.

If your study relates to the question “Has active learning improved students’ academic success?,” you may be able to submit your proposal under the Center for Teaching and Learning’s active learning umbrella IRB. This service is intended to make it easier and more efficient for you to navigate the IRB process. More information is available on our Umbrella IRB form.

Resource:

Martin, R. (2014). Navigating the IRB: The ethics of SoTL. In R.A.R. Gurung & J.H. Wilson (Eds.), Doing the scholarship of teaching and learning: Measuring systematic changes to teaching and improvements in learning. (pp. 59-71). John Wiley & Sons.

UGA Libraries/CTL SoTL Research Guide, tab on Ethics and IRB

Methods: Collecting and Analyzing Data

You have likely considered final, or summative, assessments (assignments) in your course as sources of data: exams, papers, presentations, or other final products that students typically produce towards the end of your course. These are fine sources of data; however, these assignments may represent the synthesis of different skills and forms of knowledge beyond the scope of your SoTL study.

Think about formative assessments that you can use to collect data on how and what students are learning as your study progresses:

  • Selected questions from an exam or standardized assessment measure
  • Classroom Assessment Techniques, or CATs, a form of active learning
  • Evidence of student thinking: Observation of students (recorded as field notes), audio recordings of student group work, think-alouds
  • Instructor reflections: Your own written reflections on student learning and how that relates to your instruction
  • Student self-report of learning: Interviews or focus groups with students (current or past), surveys.

If you have a more exploratory SoTL study, qualitative measures such as case studies, interviews, and focus groups tend to be more useful for these studies.

This brief yet informative guide from Nancy Chick, Gathering Evidence: Making Student Learning Visible (PDF), talks a little about direct vs. indirect evidence of learning and breaks down qualitative and quantitative sources of data.

Once you’ve identified methods you want to try, here are some resources to dive deeper:

Presenting and Publishing SoTL Work

As Yeo et. al. (2023) write, “SoTL’s emphasis on ‘going public’ stems from a desire to create a culture where we learn from each other in order to improve the teaching and learning environment.” (p. 195). Ideally, you identified a conference or targeted a journal when you were designing your study. Here are a few conferences to consider:

Local and regional conferences

National conferences

International conferences

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Kennesaw State University has a comprehensive teaching conferences directory that you can filter by location, discipline, and topic.

KSU’s CETL also offers a teaching journals directory that you can filter by topic or discipline. Please also see our UGA SoTL Research Guide for an additional list of SoTL journals.

Resources:

Healey, M., Matthews, K. E., & Cook-Sather, A. (2019). Writing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning articles for peer-reviewed journals. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 7(2), 28–50. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.7.2.3

Yeo, M., Miller-Young, J.M., & Manarin, K. (2024). Disseminating SoTL (Part IV). SoTL research methodologies: a guide to conceptualizing and conducting the scholarship of teaching and learning. Routledge.

Questions about the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning?

Contact Jennifer Eimers (Assistant Director for Scholarship of Teaching & Learning) via [email protected]!