Skip to main content

‘SoTL’

Lessons from a Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning – Post 3: Reasons for doing systematic inquiry and final reflections

Sep. 1, 2021—by Leah Marion Roberts, Senior Graduate Teaching Fellow   Welcome to the final post in this series on systematic inquiry in teaching and learning contexts. This spring, Cynthia Brame and I facilitated a journal club looking at different ways to investigate student learning. In this blog series, I’m sharing some highlights of our collective learning,...

Read more


Lessons from a Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning – Post 2: Affective/Cognitive Inquiry and Qualitative/quantitative approaches

Aug. 25, 2021—by Leah Marion Roberts, Senior Graduate Teaching Fellow   Assessment of student learning is an essential practice in teaching. As mentioned in the first post in this blog series, asking questions and collecting data about our classes systematically can deepen our knowledge of student experience in our classrooms, and hopefully lead to improved teaching practices. ...

Read more


Lessons from a Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning – Post 1: What is vs. what works?

Aug. 18, 2021—by Leah Marion Roberts, Senior Graduate Teaching Fellow   Assessment of student learning is a familiar and essential component of teaching.  As college instructors, we constantly ask ourselves questions like: “Are my students learning?” “What do they still not understand?” “Do students feel they can approach me with questions or concerns?”or, “That cool new thing...

Read more


Spring Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning

Dec. 15, 2020—In this journal club we will explore different approaches that college instructors can use to investigate how and what our students are learning. We will discuss research articles that illustrate how a range of methods can be used to understand our teaching and our students’ learning, considering benefits and limitations of the methods for answering...

Read more


Spring Journal Club: Investigating Student Learning

Nov. 9, 2020—In this journal club we will explore different approaches that college instructors can use to investigate how and what our students are learning. We will discuss research articles that illustrate how a range of methods can be used to understand our teaching and our students’ learning, considering benefits and limitations of the methods for answering...

Read more


How engaging in educational research influenced my teaching

Mar. 5, 2018—by Ryan Bowen, CFT Graduate Assistant When it came to teaching, I used to have intuitive sense about what effective instruction looked like in the classroom. I could walk into a room, deliver a lesson, facilitate an activity, and assess learning in some capacity. If my students met a certain performance standard or quantitative score...

Read more


Coupling curriculum revision and scholarship in the School of Nursing

May. 18, 2016—We need to have coordinated lectures throughout our curriculum so that students get key concepts early and then build on that solid foundation. We need to avoid undesired redundancy. We need to keep students engaged throughout the three 8-hour days they spend with us in block. We need to quit powerpointing students to death. In...

Read more


CFT Assistant Directors Publish Study on Graduate Student SoTL Programs

Mar. 19, 2015—Assistant Directors Nancy Chick and Cynthia Brame have just published their findings from a study of Vanderbilt graduate students’ research and experiences in the CFT’s programs in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). “An Investigation of the Products and Impact of Graduate Student SoTL Programs: Observations and Recommendations from a Single Institution” was published...

Read more


SoTL Scholars Program is Accepting Applications

Dec. 18, 2014—The SoTL Scholars Program introduces participants to the principles and practices of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, an international, multidisciplinary field of disciplinary specialists studying student learning. SoTL is a synthesis of teaching, learning, and research in higher education that aims to bring a scholarly lens—the curiosity, the inquiry, the rigor, the disciplinary variety—to what happens...

Read more


From the Stacks…

Nov. 18, 2014—Engaging in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning by Cathy Bishop-Clark and Beth Dietz-Uhler This is a book for anyone who has ever considered engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and needs a better understanding of what it is, and how to engage in it. The authors describe how to create a...

Read more