What are the best parts of your course? How do you know?

This session is for those who want to systematically investigate their teaching, applying the same scholarly habits we use in the lab and field to make our learning environments as effective as possible. Participants will leave with a plan to collect data on an upcoming course such that they can present the results of their Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) work to the next class of students, at a department meeting, or at EER 2021!

All mini-workshops will take place online, via Zoom (unless otherwise noted). Participants will be sent links to the Zoom room and connection info will be posted below prior to the session start.

Session Connection Info

This workshop has already taken place.

Goals

By the end of this workshop, participants will:

• Describe a SoTL project they would like to take on
• Develop a plan to collect data on an upcoming course

Program

(Program starts at 12pm PT / 1pm MT / 2pm CT / 3pm ET; times below are represented as hour:minute to standardize among time zones)

00:00 Welcome, overview of mini-workshop, virtual introductions to each other & SoTL
00:15 Identifying the "end users" of SoTL

• Defining who these people are
• Empathizing with their needs

0:40 What are the tools in our SoTL toolbox?

• Conducting research with human subjects
• Tools to collect data: surveys, interviews, and other assessments. Links to existing resources are on our program page.

01:00 Break - Stretch your legs, tend to other tasks, or peruse existing resources.
01:30 Discussion and planning time in breakout rooms

• What questions about your course(s) would you like to have answered?
• What tools will you use?
• How will you analyze your data?
• What potential opportunities and challenges exist that could make this project easier or harder to tackle?

02:00 Digital Gallery Walk: Getting and giving feedback on your SoTL plan
02:20 Workshop evaluation & wrap up
02:30 Adjourn

Resources

Workshop Slides

• Mini-workshop presentation
• Mini-workshop presentation PDF (Acrobat (PDF) 845kB Jul9 20)

IRB Examples

• Sample IRB applications

Tools for Conducting SoTL

• The GER Toolbox. A great starting point for geoscience SoTL and GER alike!
• Jump directly to the Instruments and Surveys Collection
• PhysPort has a great collection of assessments and tips for analyzing results. Database includes assessments for physics specifically, but also scientific reasoning, problem solving, student attitudes and beliefs, and more.
• Chemistry education assessments that could be adapted - includes surveys and questionnaires on things like attitudes towards chem, lab anxiety, and expectations.
• Compendium of research instruments on teacher practices, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and content knowledge.
• Compendium of research instruments on measuring students' content knowledge, reasoning skills, and psychological attributes.

Sharing Your SoTL

• Consider a talk, poster, teaching demo or share-a-thon presentation for the 2021 Rendezvous!
• Watch for NAGT-sponsored sessions at GSA and AGU, which you can find here.
• More resources by discipline, arranged by STEM field. These pages include journals in which someone could publish their SoTL or DBER work.

• Note: Some journals focus more heavily on SoTL and some more on DBER. For example, biology has [link https://www.coursesource.org/ 'CourseSource'] and [link https://www.lifescied.org/ 'CBE-Life Sciences Education'] among others. SoTL work in the geosciences is often published in NAGT's In The Trenches and the Journal of Geoscience as Curriculum & Instruction articles, as well as non-discipline specific journals like Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research (SPUR) and Journal of College Science Teaching.

More resources will be added based on our workshop discussions!