UM faculty engage in SoTL projects
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) brings together research and teaching.
A growing number of faculty and graduate student instructors at the University of Mississippi are engaging in what’s known as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), sometimes called “teaching as research” in STEM disciplines. SoTL begins with the belief that our work as educators merits rigorous study and analysis, just as our disciplinary-based research questions do.
Supporting faculty who want to engage in SoTL is one of the core functions of my role in CETL. Since I joined in July 2023, I’ve been working to identify and advise instructors on campus interested in this kind of research. Below, I profile three ongoing SoTL projects I have learned about. If you’re involved in a project like one of these, I would love to hear about it!
In shining a spotlight on SoTL work on campus, I hope to encourage more instructors to consider engaging in this kind of scholarship and research. CETL will launch programming in the spring semester to help you think about how this kind of research might fit within your discipline or teaching. That said, you’re always welcome to reach out to talk or brainstorm ideas with me.
A note about language: There is no single, broadly-accepted definition of SoTL. In CETL, we take an expansive view, akin to the description of Illinois State University’s CASTL program team agreed upon, as shared in McKinney (2004): “a systematic reflection on teaching and learning made public.” SoTL research should be undertaken in systematic fashion, reflect on teaching/learning practices, and be shared with others. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is not necessary; sharing with others is.
Starting small: Supporting a flipped classroom with in-class practice
Engineering graduate student Bibek Kattel knew from his experiences that undergraduate students in the electrical engineering program often need individualized instruction around the more challenging concepts in upper-level courses. When he was tasked with teaching El E 351 (Electronics Circuits 1) under the supervision of the course’s designer Dr. Winn Hutchcraft, he decided to make some adjustments to the course design. In previous semesters, Dr. Hutchcraft had fully flipped the classroom, providing video lectures that allowed ample time in class to work on practice problems. But Bibek intuited that students might need a little more in-class instruction before launching into the problems.
At CETL’s Graduate Teaching Orientation, Bibek approached us about wanting to experiment with the course design. We suggested collecting data on the impact of these changes, including student performance metrics and feedback from the students directly. We worked with Bibek to craft an Institutional Review Board (IRB) exempt application for the research.
Essentially, the fall experiment involved adding in mini-lectures to supplement the videos watched outside of class. Early in the semester, Bibek noticed that “initially, students seem to struggle when it comes to working on the problems on their own. However, once they recognize their areas for improvement, there's a noticeable uptick in effort and commitment.”
In November, I reached out to Bibek to ask how it was going. He shared: “The biggest challenge I've faced so far is that many students have expressed that they faced difficulties in understanding the material from their earlier prerequisite course. This class has actually helped them to understand the prerequisite class concepts.”
Now that the fall semester has concluded, we’ll work with Bibek to analyze the results of his experiment, including student feedback from his end-of-semester survey, and craft a write-up of the experiment.
Improving helping professions students’ empathy
Associate professor of social work Amy Fisher suspects that helping professionals are better able to serve their clients when they possess higher levels of social empathy. But how could she work with her colleagues to boost their students’ social empathy?
Social work researchers distinguish between social empathy and the kind of empathy most people are familiar with. Interpersonal empathy focuses on experiencing and understanding the experiences and emotions of others from their perspective, according to scholar Elizabeth Segal. Social empathy, by contrast, takes a wider view by adding both group-level perspective-taking (the ability to understand what it might be like to be a member of a particular group) and contextual understanding of historic, political, social, and economic barriers that members of marginalized groups encounter.
Social empathy matters in helping professions because it creates context-specific understanding when working with marginalized groups. Segal and her coauthors developed a social empathy index for capturing individuals’ agreement with statements like:
I believe that people who face discrimination have added stress that negatively impacts their lives. (contextual understanding of systemic barriers)
I feel it is important to understand the political perspectives of people I don’t agree with. (macro self-other awareness and perspective-taking)
Amy and her colleagues are working to design a pilot intervention to boost students’ social empathy. Eventually, they hope to broaden the scope beyond social work students to include other helping professions students, including nursing, communications disorders, pharmacy, and nutrition programs. We were able to help Amy and her team think through framing the study as they submitted a grant application for funding.
Challenges and boosts to student success in general chemistry
Gateway courses like general chemistry frequently find disparities in completion for historically minoritized students. For example, in general chemistry courses at UM, Black/African American and Latinx students have historic DFW (drop, fail, or withdraw) rates 60 percent higher than White students.
Eden Tanner and John Wiginton wanted to know more about why these disparities exist and, importantly, how to mitigate them. They also wanted to collect more demographic information on students than the Office of Institutional Research, Effectiveness, and Planning (IREP) collects and makes available to instructors. For that reason, the team created a 40-question survey instrument, complete with IRB approval and FERPA releases, to gather demographic information on students that could be used to understand course success.
During the 2021-2022 academic year, the team gathered completed surveys from 246 students in Chem 105 and 48 students in Chem 106. In partnership with the UM Center for Research Evaluation (CERE), they explored the demographics and student experience factors that influenced successful course completion.
The team continues to refine their research instruments to reflect their initial data collection and analysis efforts. Their goal is to build a robust, large-N model showing what student demographic characteristics are associated with higher risks of DFWs–and, importantly, what behaviors contribute to mitigating that risk. With that data, instructors of gateway courses can make intentional course design choices that support student learning and persistence.
What questions might you answer?
In a classic work in the SoTL literature, Pat Hutchings (2000) described four kinds of SoTL research questions (pp. 11-13):
What works questions: What is the relative effectiveness of one particular teaching intervention or approach over another?
What is questions: What is going on with learners or within a classroom? What are the constituent features of a teaching invention or approach?
Visions of the possible: What might be possible in our classrooms? What can we learn from exceptional and perhaps unplanned outcomes?
Theory building: What models or conceptual frameworks might help us further develop our scholarship of teaching and learning?
Most SoTL scholars start at the first level–what works?--and may never move beyond that kind of research inquiry. And that’s ok! But often a “what works” question leads to a “what is” question as instructors want to better understand existing learning dynamics before trying to improve them.
Get started!
CETL supports SoTL research through one-on-one consultations/discussions, workshops, and mentoring. We’re launching a SoTL reading group this spring; participants will commit to gathering once monthly to discuss a journal article related to SoTL research. You can also join a workshop exploring the fundamentals of SoTL, taking place from 2-3:00 pm on January 25, where you’ll be invited to think about how your own teaching might generate useful scholarly inquiry and reflections.
Want to read some foundational works in SoTL? This top-ten list shares the most-recommended works on SoTL.