The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic study of student learning in an attempt to find out what works best for their learning. Similarly to researchers in other academic disciplines, SoTL scholars adopt an empirical approach to studying teaching and learning and endeavour to make their research findings public via conferences and refereed publications, with the added benefit of being able to apply their findings to their own teaching practices.
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Examples of Good Practice
Dr. Celia Popovic from the Faculty of Education at York University discusses her ongoing research, “Understanding Undergraduates”.
View Transcript for the Understanding Undergraduates Video
York Support
At the Teaching Commons, teaching is thought of as reasoned practice akin to scholarly inquiry. Teaching is not only driven by the desire to help students learn, but also to discover how students achieve learning outcomes most effectively.
Let’s TaLC about it!
TaLC, the Teaching and Learning Collective, is a group of York scholars who come together on a regular basis to have scholarly conversation around teaching and learning.
The Teaching Commons plays a pivotal role in fostering this community of practitioners with monthly events, the first of which is a workshop entitled Researching Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. During the session, we will define the scholarship of teaching and learning, discuss study design and methods in SoTL research and explore questions the participants have about student learning that could be answered via scholarly inquiry. It will be taking place April 2 from 9:30 to 11:30 in TEL 1014.
Resources External to York
The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CJSoTL) is a peer reviewed, trans-disciplinary, open-access electronic journal created and supported by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
The Canadian Journal of Action Research (CJAR) is an open-access, peer-reviewed electronic journal exploring links between educational research and practice.
The guide Researching Teaching and Student Outcomes in Post-Secondary Education is an accessible introduction to methods and techniques in research on student outcomes in postsecondary education.
Written for researchers across the disciplines in simple language, Pedagogic Research in Engineering encourages readers to rethink their assumptions about research: “Pedagogical research will involve you in learning new methods of enquiry, different modes of reading and thinking and writing in different styles from those you are accustomed to. You will be examining, perhaps deeply, your assumptions about what constitutes good research” (Brown & Edmunds 2011: 3). It provides a thorough overview of pedagogical research, including how to design a study, collect and analyse qualitative data, develop quantitative tools such as survey, and inform readers about quasi-experimental design, action research and statistical analysis.
