The Use Of Metacognitive Scaffolding To Improve College Students Academic Success

In this era of accountabilities and complex ecologies, it is important to highlight results from metacognitive scaffolding, aimed at enhancing the learning strategies of a group of college freshmen preparing for the Praxis 1 examination.  The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of the use of metacognitive scaffolding used to enhance the literacy skills of 35 college students on their performance as measured by their test scores in Praxis 1 examination. It focuses on the importance of learning strategies to academic success, and literacy challenges encountered by college students. The result from the study indicates substantial improvement in students’ literacy performance on Praxis 1 examination. 

The Educational Implications of a Trans-Global Service Learning Project in Jamaica: A Qualitative Analysis

This purpose of this phenomenological qualitative research is to examine the educational impact of a trans-global service learning project with American preservice students in Jamaica. The goals were to 1) examine the educational experiences of preservice students that participated in the trans-global service learning in Jamaica, and 2) examine the role that their participation played in their ability to teach in diverse school settings. The results from multiple data collection and analysis show that students were transformed into global teachers with new cultural lenses. Several themes emerged from the study. The findings have practical, policy, and leadership implications

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