Optimizing Teaching and Learning E-Book

Regan A. R. Gurung

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 421

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is one of the most dynamic areas of research in the field of higher education today in which faculty continuously evaluate the quality of their teaching and its affect on student learning. Faculty are being held accountable for the effectiveness of their teaching and in turn they are starting to engage in SoTL-related intellectual exchanges not only in their research agendas but also in the ways in which they teach their students in the classroom. At the heart of this new movement, there is a simple idea: take a close look at how you teach and how your students learn, use the same methodology that you would use for formal investigations (be it in the humanities or sciences), and hold your research to the same standards most notably peer review.

Optimizing Teaching and Learning will serve as a guide for anyone who is interested in improving their teaching, the learning of their students, and at the same time contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It bridges the gap between the research and practice of SoTL, with explicit instructions on how to design, conduct, analyze, and write-up pedagogical research, including samples of actual questionnaires and other materials (e.g., focus group questions) that will jumpstart investigations into teaching and learning. It also explores the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical practices and present applications of SoTL using case studies from a variety of disciplines. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for both seasoned faculty and new faculty who are just beginning to assess their teaching methods and learn how to think beyond the content.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 What Is Pedagogical Research?

Multidisciplinary Roots of Pedagogical Research

Examining Definitions of Scholarship

The Other SoTL: Action Research and Teacher Research

Beginnings

Why Is Pedagogical Research Important?

A Teaching Hierarchy

A Caveat

How Can Pedagogical Research Be Useful to You?

2 Pedagogical Research

Assessing Our Teaching Effectiveness

What Can We Learn from the “Best” College Teachers?

Creating your Teaching Philosophy Statement

How Do I Teach?

Using Teaching Inventories

Determining Your Teaching Goals

Assessment Tools

Alternative Classroom Assessment Techniques

Teaching Portfolios

Learning to Conduct Pedagogical Research: How to Get Started: Designing your Pedagogical Research Program

Developing Your Research Ideas and Questions

Focus on Student Learning: Connecting Your Learning Goals, Assessment Choice, and Teaching Technique

Applying the Findings of Your Pedagogical Research: Using General Principles of Learning to Making Changes to Your Teaching Strategies

Sharing Your Findings and Connecting with Others in the Field

Conclusion

Appendix: Examples of Discipline-Specific SoTL Journals

3 Pedagogical Research

What Do You Want to Find Out?

What Do We Know about How Students Learn?

Student Engagement: If You Engage Them, They Will Learn

How Can You Investigate Your Students’ Learning?

How Do Students Study?

Metacognition

Measuring Study Behaviors

Can You Improve Study Skills?

Key Psychological Factors Influencing Learning

Designing Your Research: How Do You Study Your Students’ Learning?

Measuring How Performance on Your Assessments Vary

Guidelines for Human Research Participants in SoTL

A Further Note on Ethics

Conclusions

Appendix: Questions on How to Make Cognitive Research Available to Educators

4 Is It Significant?

Why Do We Need to Analyze Our Classroom Data?

Qualitative or Quantitative? That Is the Question

Setting the Stage: Important Background for Measurement and Analyses

Two Main Forms of Statistical Analyses: Descriptive Analyses

Watching Your Curves

Inferential Statistics

Software Options

Calculating Descriptive Statistics

Calculating Inferential Statistics

Kicking It Up a Notch: Testing Multiple Factors

Conclusions

5 Pedagogical Research as Scholarship

Developing a Center with a Focus on SoTL

Determining Needs on Your Campus

Determining Your Goals: What Is the Purpose of the Center?

Guiding Principles When Creating a New Center

Creating Programming Initiatives to Achieve Your Goals

Mentoring Programs

SoTL and Tenure and Promotion

The Role of Assessment

Sources for SoTL Support or Funding

What Else Is Available through Faculty Development Centers?

Potential Challenges Identified by Those Who Have Come Before You

Appendix: Useful References

References

To those who take the time and energy to care about teaching and student learning

This edition first published 2009

© 2009 Regan A. R. Gurung and Beth M. Schwartz

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gurung, Regan A. R.

Optimizing teaching and learning: practicing pedagogical research/Regan A. R. Gurung and Beth M. Schwartz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-6179-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. College teaching. 2. Reflective

teaching. 3. Learning. I. Schwartz, Beth M. II. Title.

LB2331G797 2009

378.1′2-dc22

2008028047

Preface

Where do you start when you think about teaching and learning? Conventional storytelling would suggest the beginning. But this is about telling a different kind of story. Research and advice on how to optimize student learning and teachers’ teaching suggests that the best place to start is at the end. If you know what you want your students to leave your class with, you are in a better position to design your course content and delivery to get them there. You are also well positioned to assess your students’ journey to learning and study the detours, pitfalls, or shortcuts along the way. Commonly referred to as “backward design” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, and discussed in more detail later), this approach provides a helpful framework for examining teaching and learning and makes clear the need for the two main goals of this book: 1) collecting, summarizing, and prioritizing for you, what is known about teaching and learning; and 2) providing you with easy ways to catalyze your own scholarly investigations into teaching and learning.

Research on teaching and learning (pedagogical research or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, SoTL) is one of the most energizing areas of research in the field of higher education today, in which faculty continuously evaluate the quality of their teaching and its effect on student learning. Galvanized by the efforts of the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL; in particular individuals such as Lee Shulman, Pat Hutchings, and Mary Huber), the Lilly Foundation (especially Laurie Richlin, and the Preparing Future Faculty program), the Visible Knowledge Project, and the Peer Review of Teaching Project, the banner of SoTL has been taken up by academics from diverse fields. Educators are beginning to notice the fruits of SoTL labors, and a growing number of publications and directives within the academy are drawing attention to the importance of taking a close look at how we teach and how students learn.

As emphasized by both Seldin (2004) and Hatch (2006) faculty are being held accountable for the effectiveness of their teaching and in turn they are starting to engage in intellectual exchanges, not only on their research agendas but also on the ways in which they teach their students in the classroom. Huber and Hutchings (2005) called this type of intellectual exchange a “teaching common.” At the heart of this new movement, there is a simple idea: take a close look at how you teach and how your studentslearn, use the same methodology that you would use for formal investigations (be it in the humanities or science), and hold your research to the same standards, most notably peer review.

What exactly are methodologies of pedagogical research? What do we already know about how students learn and optimal teaching? What are the best practices for optimizing teaching? This book will answer all these questions and provide practical ways to bridge the gap between research on teaching and learning and the practice of teaching. As well as summarizing the vast literature on teaching and learning and providing a source of information on topics such as what the master teachers do and what is known about how students learn, we also provide tools to facilitate pedagogical research. This book takes the reader beyond intellectual discourse on SoTL: The case for SoTL has been and continues to be made by vocal and noted leaders in the field. This book will provide specific techniques to put these findings into action together with a clear guide on how to assess the fruits of your labor.

Why should academics care, given all else we have to care about? One of the most critical deterrents to doing this sort of methodological inquiry into teaching and learning has been the lack of a clear reward structure for such work and a corresponding lack of motivation on the part of those interested. As Fink (2003) notes throughout his work, research on teaching and learning takes a great deal of time and effort. Without an institutional culture in which this type of scholarship is recognized and valued, faculty will spend that time and effort elsewhere. Now universities, colleges, and high schools nationwide are not only beginning to recognize and value educators who are interested in SoTL, but are also starting to require that teaching and learning be studied (O’Meara and Rice, 2005). Researchers in the field of education and psychology have been particularly active in taking basic research from each of their fields and applying it to the classroom, and their theories and methods are inspiring faculty in many other diverse areas. All SoTL must incorporate the qualities of any good science, which includes an objective assessment based on data that is verifiable and that holds up to peer review (Richlin, 2006; Weimer, 2006). Unfortunately, there is currently no adequate resource that serves as a guide both to demonstrate how to conduct pedagogical research within any field of study and to provide best practices based on the existing pedagogical research findings. This book will do just this, providing a resource for anyone who is interested in improving their teaching, the learning of their students, and, correspondingly, contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning. In short, this book will bridge the gap between the research on pedagogy and the practice of pedagogy, with explicit instructions on how to design, conduct, analyze, and write up pedagogical research. It will also explore the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical practices and present applications of SoTL using case studies from a variety of disciplines. To this end we review and summarize the current writing on pedagogical research and provide examples of questionnaires or explicit research protocols to help guide the design of investigations into teaching or learning. The surveys or questions can be directly taken and used to catalyze personal investigations into one’s teaching and one’s students’ learning.

Although the rigor of the scientific method or the varieties of ways of knowing in the humanities are valid and necessary parts of how teaching and learning should be viewed, many faculty are trained to apply these methods to their research endeavors and not to student learning or to their teaching. Furthermore, although one’s discipline can be applied to investigate the problems of teaching and learning, the resistance of these same problems to the discipline’s familiar modes of inquiry can limit the motivation to conduct SoTL and even contaminate its efforts (Huber & Morreale, 2002). In essence, as more and more faculty are being encouraged to assess the effectiveness of their teaching, they will in turn need the tools necessary for that type of assessment. Only when those tools are made available will faculty be more comfortable stepping outside their research comfort zone and into the forum of SoTL. When instructors learn the importance of going beyond the content and better understanding the process of teaching and learning, students in their classroom in turn learn more material and learn that material more effectively. Unfortunately a large number of teachers enter the classroom without a background in the very essence of what makes good teaching and learning. However, as Bain (2004) illustrates, the best teachers continually collect evidence to assess the effectiveness of their teaching. Similarly, SoTL scholars such as Davis and Buskist (2006) illustrate that when one understands and believes that assessing teaching effectiveness is essential, one can then become a more effective teacher. This book will serve as a resource for all faculty to conduct this type of continuous assessment – both seasoned faculty and new faculty who are just beginning to assess their teaching methods and learn how to think beyond the content.

This book is designed to be a resource for faculty who are engaged in SoTL projects and for faculty developers who promote SoTL. It should also be useful to any faculty member who is interested in examining their own teaching and their students’ learning as part of becoming a more effective teacher. A number of books on the market provide readers with how to present or organize one’s teaching accomplishments through use of a teaching portfolio (e.g., Bernstein et al., 2006, Seldin, 2004) or are driven to strengthening the case for SoTL work (e.g., Huber & Hutchings, 2005). This book builds upon these existing books by providing faculty with methodologies for conducting SoTL in order to strengthen the supporting data used in one’s teaching portfolio. This book can be a part of graduate courses on teaching and learning in higher education and can be especially useful reading for new and midlevel faculty. Given that higher education is being called on to demonstrate the effectiveness of what it is doing, the pressure for more scholarship on teaching and learning is going to increase. Faculty development programs nationwide have already been holding training sessions to increase SoTL, and more and faculty are interested in this area. Journals such as MountainRise, and Inventio and others publishing the results of these investigations have originated in almost every discipline, and many junior faculty are learning of the importance of SoTL for tenure and promotion.

Each section will first summarize years of work in pertinent areas to provide a foundation for scholarly investigation. In chapter 1, we clarify the nature of pedagogical research and distinguish between the different labels currently in use (e.g., Scholarly Teaching, SoTL, Action Research) and review the history of the field. In the two consequent chapters we focus on teaching (chapter 2) and learning (chapter 3), first reviewing and summarizing the relevant literature and then providing guidelines on how to conduct scholarly research on the questions we raise. Once you have caught the excitement of conducting research on your teaching and student learning, been convinced it is a good idea, or even if you are strong-armed into doing it, you will probably be faced with one of two big problems. You have no idea what to look at? You have too much to look at? The first is an illusion: You will almost certainly discover there is a lot you want to examine once you know how to look. The second problem is a blessing not even in disguise. Having a plethora of research questions ensures you will not get bored. No matter which of these two problems may be yours, chapters 2 and 3 will provide you with a roadmap to getting starting, offering reviews of the literature that will serve to bring you up to date with some of the best prescriptions for conducting research on teaching and learning while providing you with options for further reading. Once you have collected your data- measured student learning or assessed whether your changes have worked- you need to be able to analyze what you have and establish if you have significant findings. Chapter 4 describes the basic statistical methods for evaluating your findings. We walk you through the main considerations in designing studies and provide explicit instructions on how to analyze your data using a commonly used statistical package (with clear examples and screen shots of commands and results).

In chapter 4 we provide what, as far as we can tell, is the only explicit and straightforward guide to the statistical analysis of pedagogical research on teaching and learning. Finally, we provide the reader with a wealth of information related to setting up pedagogical research centers and connection with colleagues also interested in examining their own teaching. Chapter 5 will be especially useful for those who are setting up a teaching and learning center on their campus. In the end, we hope you find that you have found the answers to many of the teaching and learning questions you have always wondered about and gained the knowledge to create your own pedagogical research program. Doing your own pedagogical research will help you answer even more questions and allow you to share your findings to others in the field. We also hope we will help you ask the right questions about your teaching and your students’ learning, to find the tools needed to analyze your data and interpret your findings in relation to existing knowledge in the field. Importantly, we hope that this guide will provide the tools needed to be more effective in the classroom.

Acknowledgments

Neil Lutsky and the other wonderful faculty at Carleton College (MN) showed me what it means to be a passionate teacher. Neil took the time to make sure that I realized that it is worth it to care about teaching and introduced me to a world of wonderful passionate teachers within the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Jane Halonen, Bill Buskist, and Bill Hill, amongst others. I thrive on my friendships with them and am a better teacher because of it. Colleagues both in the University of Wisconsin System and on my own campus and department (especially the Teaching Scholars and Fellows, members of OPID, and my faculty friends and collaborators) catalyzed my interests in pedagogical research, and I am grateful to them for putting up with my constant search for the empirical answers to any and every classroom quandary. Denise Scheberle and Fergus Hughes, Founding Co-Directors of the UWGB Teaching Scholars Program, were particularly instrumental in fostering my growth as a pedagogical scholar. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my teaching and research assistants with whom I had many a stimulating pedagogical conversation especially Amanda Jeske, Angie Roethel, and Janet Weidert.

R. A. R. G.

As a student in class at Colby College, with faculty who were dedicated to teaching and learning, I was inspired to continue my education and to learn how to create the same stimulating learning environment for my own students. Since the day I first set foot on campus, my colleagues at Randolph College (founded as Randolph-Macon Woman’s College) exemplified the joy of teaching. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in the psychology department over the years, Dennis Goff, Rory McElwee, Rick Barnes, and Holly Tatum, who all have provided mentoring, friendship, and discussions about their own teaching experiences and ideas, which to this day continue to make me strive to be a better teacher and scholar every time I step into the classroom. I also thank my many students, who continue to bring to the classroom their energy and interest, which inspire me to be the best that I can be as a teacher, providing for them an optimal learning environment. These are the people who lead me to continually rethink, refine, and improve as an educator.

B. M. S.

We both would like to thank Chris Cardone at Wiley-Blackwell and her editorial staff for cultivating the ideas for this book and helping to make it a reality.

1

What Is Pedagogical Research?

How do we know if our students are learning? How do we know if we are teaching well? Do research methods really exist that allow us to answer these questions? We all realize the importance of understanding if our students are learning and whether we are teaching well. However, the process by which to answer these important questions is often outside the area of expertise of many academics, though if given the tools we could all head into the classroom with a greater understanding of how our methods of teaching influence students’ learning.

In addition to learning the tools and methods available to conduct pedagogical research, we also need to gain an understanding of the existing literature in which many scholars have emerged as pioneers in the field of scholarship of teaching and learning. We must identify those pioneers and use the knowledge gained from their research and use that to develop our own pedagogical investigations. When examining student learning and optimal teaching, the disciplines of education and educational psychology provide a good starting point for our look at how to examine teaching and learning. Although we will draw strongly from these areas, we will also be tapping into many other disciplines that focus on how teaching and learning can be improved. As much as the field of education and educational psychology seem to have cornered the pedagogical research market, the big difference is that researchers in those areas treat the classrooms of others as their laboratory. The pedagogical research we will examine puts your own classroom, teaching, and learning under the microscope. But we digress. What is pedagogical research? Why should you care?

Pedagogical research can be easily defined as research on teaching and learning. It can provide the answer to a wide range of questions, such as why a class goes awry, or why students fail to grasp the concepts taught, or why despite our best efforts students exhibit no signs of creative thinking or higher learning. Changes in higher education are also driving up interest in teaching and learning. The composition of our classes is changing, there are different national priorities, greater public accountability, and changing pedagogical techniques (Huber & Morreale, 2002). Clearly, we need to pay attention to pedagogical research. It is the umbrella term that encompasses a number of other terms such as action research, scholarly teaching, and, a term we hear more and more often, SoTL.

By now you have probably heard the acronym SoTL. Some pronounce each letter and call it S-OH-T-L, others So-till, and still others, Su-till (as in “subtle”). Although it may look like yet another of the myriad acronyms that dot the educational landscape, in recent years we have seen a number of publications heralding the worthiness and proliferation of the scholarship of teaching and learning (e.g., Becker & Andrews, 2004; Cambridge, 2004; Hatch, 2006; McKinney, 2007; Savory, Burnett, & Goodburn, 2007), though few publications place SoTL into the greater context of educational research. This introductory chapter traces the development of pedagogical research from before the time Boyer first coined the phrase SoTL in 1990 (there was pedagogical research long before the use of the phrase) to the present day. Along the way we will provide critical reviews of the extant literature on SoTL and also disentangle the many related terms that have been used to describe similar pursuits (i.e., action and teacher research and scholarly teaching).

First a little more on why we use the phrase pedagogical research for describing the systematic investigation of teaching and learning. After reading a variety of sources and being exposed to a number of terms (to be reviewed briefly), we believe pedagogical research is the phrase that best captures the essence of scholarly work that is conducted to optimize teaching and learning. We also believe that this term is less value-laden than SoTL and other variations on the theme. In our view, pedagogical research encompasses SoTL, action and teacher research, scholarly teaching, and essentially any other phrase used in this arena. There is a lot of debate about what constitutes SoTL, and, rather than getting into the detail of that we will focus on what we know about optimal teaching and optimizing learning, and the steps needed to achieve it. This optimization is what teachers care about. Our goal is to show you how to do it in the easiest, most reliable and most valid way possible. Along the way we will also expose you to the results of years of pedagogical research as well as highlight many unanswered questions and issues. We hope to stimulate your intellectual curiosity in elucidating quandaries, which will catalyze both your teaching and your own pedagogical research.

A number of different academic areas explore pedagogical research with an emphasis on research from the fields of education and psychology and the work of a wide array of scholars (e.g., Entwistle, Hestenes-Hake, Huber, Perry, Shulman). Just as a rose by any another name is still a rose, so too research on teaching and learning is still essentially pedagogical research, no matter what discipline the research is based in. In many disciplines, the methodologies formerly used by faculty for research are now recognized as valuable resources to assess methods of teaching. This transformation has only slowly emerged over the last decade but it is spreading and growing exponentially. as general questions of inquiry lead to more and more refined questions.

Multidisciplinary Roots of Pedagogical Research

Research on teaching and learning has a long history in various disciplines and is more widespread than one may have imagined. In a recent review of the history and diversity of pedagogical research, Maryellen Weimer (2006) notes that almost all the major disciplines have pedagogical journals. By giving one of the most comprehensive listings of publication outlets for pedagogical research, Weimer’s work clearly shows that, if one wants to learn more about how to optimize teaching and learning, there are many places to look. There are also many outlets to publish your own pedagogical research. There are journals and magazines written for higher-education audiences such as Academic Medicine, Journal of Economic Education, Teaching Philosophy, and Teaching Sociology, and a number of discipline-based pedagogical journals written for educators at various levels. Some examples of this second group include Art Education, HistoryTeacher, Business Education Forum, and Physics Teacher. Weimer also identifies cross-disciplinary publications written by and for faculty in different fields (e.g., Journal of College Science Teaching) and theme-based journals written by and for postsecondary educators (e.g., Active Learning in HigherEducation).

As a testament to the (mostly unknown) longevity of pedagogical research, the earliest journal articles on teaching and learning were published back in 1924 with the first edition of the Journal of Chemical Education, a publication still in press today. Many of the journals that began a long time ago started as newsletters (e.g., Teaching of Psychology;, conversely, many pedagogical publications are not published on paper at all: a number of outlets exist in online form only. A recent example is the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (IJSOTL), a peer-reviewed electronic journal published twice a year by the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Georgia Southern University, the first issue of which appeared in January 2007.

Examining Definitions of Scholarship

Do you want to optimize student learning but don’t know how to do it? If you have always wondered if your efforts to improve your teaching and trials and errors in the classroom actually have a name, this section is for you.

We introduced the term pedagogical research to avoid the snares and snafus of definition arguments. But as academics we cannot shy away from a good debate. What is SoTL? Is SoTL the same as education research or teacher research? Is it different from pedagogical research? The phrase Scholarship of Teaching and Learning entered the national higher-education consciousness in 1990. It is not that this type of work did not exist before then. It is just that the events taking place that year, and Boyer’s (1990) exploration of the diverse nature of scholarship, raised awareness of pedagogical research. SoTL is often referred to as a new field, in which research focuses on the assessment of student learning in connection to particular teaching practices, but (as we will illustrate shortly) research on student learning or pedagogical research in one form or the other has been taking place from the beginnings of formal education. In fact, the view that scholarship is primarily synonymous with research and does not encompass the examination of teaching and learning is a relatively recent (postwar) phenomenon (Rice, 2005).

People have been talking about pedagogical research and SoTL (though not using the same terms) for over a hundred years. The Harvard psychologist William James was asked to give a few public lectures to Cambridge teachers in 1892. In his talk, he not only expressed how knowledge of psychology could help the teachers teach better and understand their students better, but he asked teachers to “deem it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible manner” (James, 1899/2006, p. 9). The concepts and ideas were present, but no term was coined at the time or specific field of research identified. Some years later, in his inaugural address as the fifth president of the University of Chicago in 1928, Robert Maynard Hutchins essentially suggested faculty should carry out pedagogical research on their students (Thompson, Nelson, & Naremore, 2001). These two examples suggest that the concept of SOTL existed long before Boyer popularized the term.

The emergence of the now ubiquitous acronym SoTL is more the reflection of a political uprising of sorts. As the story goes, there were rumblings of discontent in the academy. The late 1980s saw issues such as assessment, active learning, cost containment, and accountability coming to the fore (Edgerton, 2005). In addition, colleges and universities began to take a closer look at faculty priorities. In early 1990 a study of 23,000 faculty, chairs, and administrators showed that teaching received too little emphasis in comparison to research (Gray, Froh, & Diamond, 1992). This project helmed by Syracuse University showed that this sentiment was commonly held across universities (Diamond & Adam, 2000) and led to major institutions such as Stanford University and the University of California System taking a close look at faculty rewards and what constituted scholarship.

Boyer’s (1990) somewhat incendiary Scholarship Reconsidered, which used the phrase “scholarship of teaching,” was released into this whirlpool of change. His thesis that scholarship needed a broader definition catalyzed extensive examination of the work done on teaching and learning and flexed the political muscle of organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The results are staggering (O’Meara & Rice, 2005). For example, shortly after its publication 62 percent of chief academic officers in colleges reported that Scholarship Reconsidered had influenced decisions regarding faculty reward (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroft, 1997). National studies also illustrated that Boyer’s report influenced the reform of the faculty reward system and especially the recognition of scholarship on teaching (e.g., Braxton, Luckey, & Holland, 2002). Most recently, the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE, now defunct), building on strong testimonies at its annual Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards conferences, launched a two-year project that both surveyed chief academic officers nationwide and gathered best practices of encouraging the scholarship of teaching from entire institutions. The result, Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship, nicely illustrates how the scholarship of teaching and pedagogical research is fostered nationwide (O’Meara & Rice, 2005).

The call to give teaching a place in the broader vision of scholarship was enthusiastically acted on by many eager to increase a focus on teaching and learning and was soon supported by a rich body of publications. For example, Lee Shulman wrote a motivating piece in Harvard EducationalReview (1987), Angelo and Cross (1993) jumpstarted classroom assessment with their classic compendium of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs), and more attention was paid to developing new ways of evaluating teaching, giving rise to the greater use of teaching portfolios (Seldin, 1997). Near the end of the decade, Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) at the National Research Council released How People Learn: Brain, Mind,Experience, and School, a tour de force report on what was known about cognition and learning that provided additional dimensions for pedagogical research.

It has been nearly twenty years since Scholarship Reconsidered was published, and today SoTL is a well-known phrase used by multiple national and international organizations such as the International Alliance for Teaching Scholars (IATS) and the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). Labels are empowering entities. Akin to the political force, visibility, and ownership that the politically correct terms such as Asian American and African American gave members of the related ethnic groups, SoTL has provided faculty interested in pedagogical research a rallying cry and a flag to follow. As the following chapters will show, with the publicizing of the phrase SoTL in response to Boyer and subsequent work of his Carnegie colleagues (e.g., Shulman and Hutchins) among others, this type of research has been recognized only recently in most disciplines as a legitimate area of scholarship, worthy of recognition equal to that of more traditional lines of research and inquiry. However as Kuh (2004) notes, this “new” line of research, is really a new spin on what researchers in certain fields of study have focused on for decades. So what has been going on in other fields? It is time for a short excursion into the history of pedagogical research.

The Other SoTL: Action Research and Teacher Research

As previously stated, educators have been examining their own teaching long before the advent of the phrase SoTL. Two major movements, actionresearch (as it is more commonly referred to in North America) and teacherresearch (as a similar movement is more often referred to in the United Kingdom), also involve the systematic examination of teaching and learning. These investigations primarily conducted in K-12 settings are consequently off the radar of most higher-education faculty but provide many useful parallels and procedures.

Action research. Action research is any systematic inquiry conducted to gather information about how schools operate, how they teach, and how well their students learn (Mills, 2007). The origins of action research are obscure, but Kurt Lewin in the mid-1940s constructed a theory that described action research as “proceeding in a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of planning, action and the evaluation of the result of action” (Kemmis & McTaggert, 1990, p. 8). Lewin argued that in order to “understand and change certain social practices, social scientists have to include practitioners from the real social world in all phases of inquiry” (McKernan 1991, p. 10). This construction of action research theory by Lewin made action research a method of acceptable inquiry, and it grew in prominence worldwide. In the United States, action research had its roots in the progressive education movement and the work of John Dewey. In the United Kingdom action research fostered curricular reform and increased professionalism in teaching, and in Australia, action research brought about collaborative curriculum planning (Mills, 2007). Currently, action research is the preferred modus operandi for teacher-researchers.

The teacher-researcher movement. The simple combination of the words “teacher” and “researcher” serve as an upfront indicator of the twin thrust of this movement. While teachers educate as subjective insiders involved in classroom interaction, researchers traditionally design studies to answer questions of interest and are merely objective outside observers of classroom processes (MacClean & Mohr, 1999). But when teachers become teacher-researchers, the “traditional descriptions of both teachers and researchers change. Teacher-researchers raise questions about what they think and observe about their teaching and their students’ learning. They collect student work in order to evaluate performance, but they also see student work as data to analyze in order to examine the teaching and learning that produced it” (Maclean & Mohr, 1999, p. x).

Originating in the United Kingdom with the work of Stenhouse (1975) and the Humanities Curriculum Project, teacher-researchers are now found worldwide. Stenhouse felt that all teaching should be based upon research, and that research and curriculum development were the preserve of teachers (McKernan, 1991). Other significant teacher-researcher developments include the Ford Teaching Project, the Classroom Action Research Network, and work supported by the National Writing Project.

How is action or teacher research different from SoTL? Apart from the superficial labeling difference where the former terms are more often used for K-12 and secondary-school-level research on teaching and learning whereas the latter is applied to higher education, SoTL tends to emphasize the use of disciplinary-specific methodologies. As we move into the next generation of SoTL research, these disciplinary differences are diminished. Faculty are more likely to want to use the best method to answer their pedagogical questions and not limit themselves to the methodologies of their home fields, which can prove limiting. In fact, the current literature documents traditional and traditionally problematic pedagogies. We hope this book will inspire the movement toward re-envisioning disciplinary-based pedagogies through the lens of how students actually learn and seeking evidence for that learning. We present a framework for the next stage of SoTL whereby scholars connect their own work on teaching and learning to the work already out there on traditional pedagogies and learning in their disciplines.

Beginnings

Although the term SoTL is a somewhat relative newcomer to the scene, people have been thinking about how to improve teaching and learning for centuries. In a recent history of the field of educational psychology, Berliner traces the modern trend of thinking about individual differences, development, the nature of the material being taught, problem solving, and assessment to the ancient Jewish rite of the Passover (2006, p. 4). The leader of the Passover service told the story of the Passover each year but differently to each of his sons according to the sons’ own specific aptitudes. Plato and Aristotle discussed such topics as the role of the teacher, the relations between teacher and student, and the means and methods of teaching (Watson, 1961). Berliner (2006) similarly describes how writers down the centuries from the Roman Quintilian (first century), Juan Luis Vives (fifteenth century), Comenius (sixteenth century), Herbart (eighteenth century), to the philosopher Joseph Scwhab (1973) have given serious thought to, and written about, education. Education psychologists also have identified a “father of research on teaching,” Joseph Mayer Rice (1912), who conducted empirical classroom-based research, and a “grandfather,” William James (1842–1910), mentioned previously, who was asked to present Cambridge educators with lectures on the new psychology (James, 1899/2006). Other psychologists have tackled education. G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association, was professor of psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University. John Dewey, like Hall, was a former classroom teacher who respected the complexity of teaching and also contributed greatly to the methodological study of education (Dewey, 1910).

Researchers in the area of student development take a completely different tack. focusing primarily on the psychosocial development of the student and how the level of development influences student learning. To measure student development, a number of inventories were developed to assess how students change and develop during their college years, including the Iowa Student Development Inventory (Hood, 1986) and the Student Developmental Task Inventory (Prince, Miller, & Winston, 1974). However, this field includes a wide range of areas of study, and some of particular interest to us, including an examination of the knowledge and cognitive skills that students are expected to acquire during the college years. In this area of the field of student development we measure the development of cognitive skills such as higher-order thinking and reasoning abilities. Research by Perry (1970), Gilligan (1982), and Wood (1983) led to the development of assessment tools to measure higher-order thinking. Interestingly, results from this line of research illustrated the limited cognitive skills of most entering first-year college students. This in turn led to discussions of how to teach these students given their level of cognitive development when entering college. Therefore, the question of pedagogical choices and their impact on student learning is not a new field of inquiry. However, in past decades the majority of those involved in this area of scholarship were in the field of higher education and/or psychology. In particular, students at the undergraduate level who are “majoring” in the field of education learn how one chooses effective teaching strategies, focusing on the questions of interest to scholars in the area of SoTL. Interestingly, this is rarely a component for students at the graduate level who are obtaining a doctoral degree, many of whom will be teaching at colleges and universities across the globe.

Fortunately, in more recent years, this line of research is one of interest to academics across all fields who are interested in determining just how effective they are at teaching.

The foremost champion of SoTL is undoubtedly the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which, since 1905, has carried out a wide range of activities and research that has helped to support and advance the work of teachers at all levels. In 1998, the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching (CASTL) was established when Lee Shulman became president of the Carnegie Foundation. CASTL was formed to provide faculty with ways to optimize postsecondary teaching and learning. The program has three parts. CASTL funds faculty as “Carnegie Scholars” and has them conduct research on specific pedagogical topics, offers campus programs for colleges and universities to foster SoTL, and provides initiatives with disciplinary groups aimed at fostering SoTL within their disciplines. The first program has involved over 150 faculty as fellows at the CASTL advanced study center in Palo Alto, California, and the other two initiatives have initiated a number of publications and conferences (see Huber and Hutchings, 2005, for a detailed report). A great deal of the advancement of the field of SoTL can be credited to the many individuals involved with CASTL. This foundation started the support, and continues to do so, necessary for this line of line of research to become a viable component of the academic culture on campuses both nationally and internationally. Through the efforts of those involved with CASTL, teaching is no longer a private endeavor but instead a topic of discussion that involves critical analysis of how we foster learning in the classroom.

Why is this is an important questions for all instructors to ask? As Shulman states, “an educator can teach with integrity only if an effort is made to examine the impact of his or her work on the students” (2002, p. vii), an obligation that he refers to as the pedagogical imperative. Like many others who are active in the field of SoTL, Shulman points out that assessment of our pedagogical choices should be an inherent component of our teaching.

There are other champions of pedagogical research. The Lilly Foundation has long been a supporter of teaching enhancement and has been funding faculty scholars nationwide since the 1970s. It also supports an international conference, as well as four national conferences around America. Although now defunct, the AAHE (American Association of Higher Education) also sponsored many initiatives over the years to advance teaching and its scholarship, as has the Pew Foundation.

Still others have greatly contributed to pedagogical research, but are not linked to foundations such as the Carnegie and Lilly Foundations. Maryellen Weimer for example, one-time associate director of the National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment and editor of the Teaching Professor newsletter on college teaching, has greatly helped guide and foster pedagogical research (see Menges, Weimer & associates, 1996; Weimer, 2006). Going beyond the previously discussed traditional sources, it is important to also include a look at how SoTL is conducted and defined outside America. For example Hounsell and Entwistle spearhead the British Enhancing Teaching and Learning (ETL) Project, which seeks to develop subject-specific conceptual frameworks to guide institutional and faculty or departmental development of teaching-learning environments. This group has developed a number of useful tools for pedagogical research and has also mapped out key variables that influence learning. We shall discuss work from the ETL Project in greater detail in later chapters.

Why Is Pedagogical Research Important?

Every discipline survives by training new minds to carry on the work. Although only a small number of majors may go on to graduate work, research, and teaching in the same area as their undergraduate degrees, it is upon their shoulders that academic traditions rest. Every discipline gathers and creates knowledge in different ways. The art historian combs through ancient manuscripts in foreign tongues. The chemist titrates liquids and analyzes mass spectrometry. For the philosopher, logic reigns supreme, whereas for the biologist empirical data may be the Holy Grail. That said, research is only one part of what we do as educators in academic settings. We all teach. We all step into classrooms (or virtual realities if teaching online) to help our students learn.

Those who teach far outnumber those who do basic or applied research. For example whereas only about 3,000 Ph.D.s in psychology are granted in a given year, one and a half million students take introductory psychology every year. Those who teach therefore carry a great responsibility. It is upon them that we rely to convey the basics about our various disciplines. Through general education and via requirements for the majors and minors, teachers nationwide help students learn about the different areas that make up the academy. But it is not only on the doctorate holders that we rely on to educate. Men and women with many levels of education – those in K-12 education, secondary schools, community colleges and four-year colleges and universities – all work to teach students and help them learn. This shared common goal, to educate our students no matter what the discipline or topic, is what unites all educators. Yes, there are those who want to teach and others who just have to teach, but at some level all teachers want their students to learn. You can vary in what evidence you will accept to say that learning has taken place. You can vary in how much you care about whether learning has taken place. You can vary in the extent to which you assume learning has taken place. But at the heart of it all is still the goal to have students learn. How do we know if the students are learning? Beyond the simple rubric of exam grades and appreciative nods of understanding lies the challenge we all face as teachers: the challenge to establish that our teaching is working and our students are learning.

A Teaching Hierarchy

Is pedagogical research for everyone? If you want to optimize your teaching and your students’ learning you will want to do pedagogical research at some level. Doing this research (and calling it “research”) does not have to entail the use of complex statistical models (chapter 4 will give you an introduction to the varieties of statistics that can be used) or hours of interviewing or content analysis of student writing. You could do all that, but the method you use will depend on your question (chapter 2 will discuss how to make that important connection). It is more important to decide where you want to be on the teaching hierarchy (see figure 1.1).

We have little doubt that if you’re reading this book, you reside higher up on our pyramid. However, there are many instructors who are essentially just going through the motions of teaching. They pick a textbook for their classes with little thought of the quality of the textbook but perhaps go on what they have heard many others use or the urging of a particularly persuasive textbook representative. Their syllabi contain only the most basic information and they do not really pay too much attention to what a good syllabus should contain and less attention to what students need to get from a syllabus. They go to all their classes and make their way through the material often using lecture materials they have written a long time before and reused, and material written more with an eye towards what they find interesting and capable of teaching than what the course and students really require. They mostly lecture, include little if any active learning strategies, and make no effort to improve their teaching. They are often sticklers for rules, not willing to take the time to listen to students who may have valid reasons not to stick to their mostly ambiguous but still rigid syllabi, and once a lecture, class period, or the semester is over, they do not think much of the class and may not even read their course evaluations (if they even use them). This scenario may seem somewhat extreme but we have both heard of and even talked to some instructors who are truly just going through the motions.

Figure 1.1: A teaching hierarchy

A nice notch up are instructors who are involved in sincere teaching. These instructors care about students and are sincere about doing a good job at teaching. They spend time looking at all the textbooks available for their classes and then take the time to read through textbook options before deciding on one. They make sure they check their university requirements to ensure their syllabi include everything they should. They check the syllabi of colleagues and spend time revising their syllabi with an eye towards the students who read and rely on such documents. They also spend time on their lectures. They may change lectures often to make sure they are including the most up-to-date material. They take pains to search for visuals and examples to bring the lectures to life and they also try and ensure that their students have an opportunity to participate in class, allocating time to discussion of the material. They may also willingly incur the load of grading by assigning papers and using short-answer or essay-exam questions in lieu of the easier-to-process multiple-choice exam. These instructors reflect on their performances and adapt and change in response to bad days or lectures that do not go well. Instead of plodding on ahead with their set plans for the class, they take the time to modify delivery or format to better serve their students. Not only do they pay close attention to their student evaluations, they may even have students evaluate them at many times during the semester to make sure they are doing a good job. They keep good tabs on the grade distributions and take pains to examine the causes of anomalous student performance. We believe that a significant portion of educators are teaching as described here. As you can see, this location on the hierarchy sounds pretty good and is clearly a far cry from the person going through the motions.