SoTL under Stress: Rethinking Teaching and Learning Scholarship during a Global Pandemic

This essay considers how the current age of multiple crises is leading to changes in questions we ask of teaching and learning, questions we ask in SoTL, and the role of SoTL scholars

Advancing Student Interview Skills: Incorporating Virtual Interview Technology into the Basic Communication Course

This study examined the differences between student\u27s self-reported communication interview skills before and after they received interview instructions and experienced virtual simulation interviews in a basic communication course. Incorporating interview instruction and utilizing mock interviewing software, InterviewStream, into several basic communication courses, this study found a significant difference between students\u27 pre-instruction and post-instruction interview self-assessment scores. A Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) revealed that students reported more confidence in their interviewing skills, were more likely to seek help from career services, and pay more attention to non-verbal communication during the interview (dress, posture, and eye contact) after participating in virtual mock interviews

Asking New Questions about Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship in the Post-Pandemic World

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Creactive: Creative Process Before Technology

The “Creactive” pedagogical approach is introduced before technology implementation to enhance creative outcomes. Participants will engage in aportion of this creative process

What Works? A Critical Review of the Literature on First Year Seminars

The first year seminar (FYS) has become a well-established high impact practice in U.S. higher education. That said, support for the FYS i can be ambivalent, even contested, as stakeholders can be divided regarding its purpose and implementation. In this interactive session, we present the results of a scoping review of the existing research on the FYS (1300+ articles). You will learn more about scoping reviews as a SoTL methodology, the state of research on FYS (including emerging signature pedagogies), and discuss the future of both the FYS and related research. In this case, we systematically reviewed 1300+ articles published on the FYS over the past five years (2016-present). We identified purpose, scope, method, and outcomes for each, then mapped key findings. Our analysis indicates that a relatively small percentage of research articles on the FYS are SoTL studies, but those that do exist point to an emerging set of signature pedagogies that can be applied to the FYS as well as other curricular and co-curricular experiences for first-year students. In this interactive session, we will share the results of our scoping review, with attention to explaining the methodology for others less familiar with it. In addition, we will engage participants in the signature FYS pedagogies and discuss how the results inform questions about the future of the FYS

The Belonging Project: Embedded Collaborative Student Research on First-year Student Engagement under Covid-19

This research brief will highlight embedded undergraduate research conducted by FYE seminar students in the Fall 2020. As part of the course, the students completed a collaborative action research project on belonging strategies (theirs and others) across 3 stages: first contact with the university, in the (then) present, and projections of what they saw they might do in the unknown future. Despite limited campus interactions, students were able to identify factors contributing to their connection with each other and the institution. Implications of the research serve to amplify the significance of student voice, at all levels, in teaching and learning

Advancing Student Interview Skills: Incorporating Virtual Interview Technology into the Basic Communication Course

This study examined the differences between student's self-reported communication interview skills before and after they received interview instructions and experienced virtual simulation interviews in a basic communication course. Incorporating interview instruction and utilizing mock interviewing software, InterviewStream, into several basic communication courses, this study found a significant difference between students' pre-instruction and post-instruction interview self-assessment scores. A Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) revealed that students reported more confidence in their interviewing skills, were more likely to seek help from career services, and pay more attention to non-verbal communication during the interview (dress, posture, and eye contact) after participating in virtual mock interviews

The Hospitality of the Commons: A Collaborative Reflection on a SoTL Conference

This is a large-scale, multi-author collaborative autoethnographic study exploring the concept of building a tangible teaching commons on the example of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) Commons Conference. The project organizers sought to provide a big tent and extended an invitation to attendees to respond to a series of writing prompts about their conference experience. Collaborative writing took place asynchronously over an approximately 60-day period following the close of the conference and generated ≈ 20,000 words. This corpus became the basis for a three-stage emergent coding process, conducted by the four-member steering commit-tee, which led to the identification of three primary themes from the collective experiences of the 2023 SoTL Commons Conference attendees: SoTL as pedagogy, SoTL as a community of scholars, and SoTL as scholarship. Despite some limitations to what the sense of commons represents, the project highlighted the respondents’ spirit of appreciative inquiry, a signature mindset of SoTL and engaged participants who were new to the field. We argue that it acted as a form of academic hospitality itself; enabling the sharing of practice, deepening of reflection, strengthening of research skills, fostering of social connections, and, by extension, the advancement of the field as a community of scholars