Provides a state-of-the-field review of recent SoTL scholarship

Pivotal to the transformation of higher education in the 21st Century is the nature of pedagogy and its role in advancing the aims of various stakeholders. This book brings together pre-eminent scholars to critically assess teaching and learning issues that cut across most disciplines. Systematically explored throughout the book is the avowed linkage between classroom teaching and motivation, learning, and performance outcomes in students.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning unleashes great potential in librarianship, and academic librarians are ideal candidates for participation in SoTL projects: We're inquisitive, passionate, and we care about student success. The Grounded Instruction Librarian can provide innovative ideas and methods to help you use SoTL as a professional development tool, a research agenda, a way to create theory, or for a deeper understanding of your teaching and your students' learning.

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding. Discipline-Based Education Research is based on a 30-month study built on two workshops held in 2008 to explore evidence on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This book asks questions that are essential to advancing DBER and broadening its impact on undergraduate science teaching and learning. The book provides empirical research on undergraduate teaching and learning in the sciences, explores the extent to which this research currently influences undergraduate instruction, and identifies the intellectual and material resources required to further develop DBER. Discipline-Based Education Research provides guidance for future DBER research. In addition, the findings and recommendations of this report may invite, if not assist, post-secondary institutions to increase interest and research activity in DBER and improve its quality and usefulness across all natural science disciples, as well as guide instruction and assessment across natural science courses to improve student learning. The book brings greater focus to issues of student attrition in the natural sciences that are related to the quality of instruction. Discipline-Based Education Research will be of interest to educators, policy makers, researchers, scholars, decision makers in universities, government agencies, curriculum developers, research sponsors, and education advocacy groups.

Citizenship Across the Curriculum advocates the teaching of civic engagement at the college level, in a wide range of disciplines and courses. Using "writing across the curriculum" programs as a model, the contributors propose a similar approach to civic education. In case studies drawn from political science and history as well as mathematics, the natural sciences, rhetoric, and communication studies, the contributors provide models for incorporating civic learning and evaluating pedagogical effectiveness. By encouraging faculty to gather evidence and reflect on their teaching practice and their students' learning, this volume contributes to the growing field of the scholarship of teaching and learning.

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Guide for Scientists, Engineers, and Mathematicians shows college and university faculty members how to draw on their disciplinary knowledge and teaching experience to investigate questions about student learning. It takes readers all the way through the inquiry process beginning with framing a research question and selecting a research design, moving on to gathering and analyzing evidence, and finally to making the results public. Numerous examples are provided at each stage, many from published studies of teaching and learning in science, engineering, or mathematics. At strategic points, short sets of questions prompt readers to pause and reflect, plan, or act. These questions are derived from the authors' experience leading many workshops in the United States and Canada on how to do the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). The taxonomy of SoTL questions-What works? What is? What could be?-that emerged from the SoTL studies undertaken by scholars in the Carnegie Academic for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning serves as a framework at many stages of the inquiry process. The book addresses the issue of evaluating and valuing this work, including implications for junior faculty who wish to engage in SoTL. The authors explain why SoTL should be of interest to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) faculty at all types of higher education institutions, including faculty members active in traditional STEM research. They also give their perspective on the benefits of SoTL to faculty, to their institutions, to the academy, and to students.

There is a renaissance in the use of the term “scholarship,” as it is being used to define areas of academic endeavour, describe academic work and achievements, and measure the quality of higher education. Although all academicians are required to engage in scholarship, it is difficult to navigate as there is a misunderstanding of this concept as new methods and approaches emerge. Emerging Methods and Paradigms in Scholarship and Education Research is an essential academic book that is designed to explain the areas of scholarship and their contemporary relationship to key components of academic work: research, teaching, service, and engagement. The chapter authors explore conceptions of scholarship, paradigms, and methods that fit a variety of contexts and needs. Highlighting a wide range of approaches from scientific realism and neo-positivism to interpretative, transformative, and pragmatic educational strategies and policy, this book is ideal for researchers, teachers, educational leaders, academicians, educational policymakers, and quality assurance agencies.