Navigating between Scylla and Charybdis: SoTL as its Own Kind of Inquiry

Although there is ample literature that explores what SoTL is and offers guidelines on how to do SoTL, we have not paid enough attention to the fundamental assumptions that underpin systematic scholarly inquiry itself, regardless of the context or the object of study. Instead, we seem to have a narrative that relates SoTL to the disciplines and/or educational research. In this paper, I challenge this narrative with the help of philosophy of science. Specifically, I argue that SoTL is at risk of being appropriated by disciplinary paradigms. This means we would do well to adjust how we conceptualize SoTL. To find a better way, I use Habermas’ concept of knowledge-constitutive interests to argue that we should start by recognizing the fundamental interests at play when we do SoTL, regardless of disciplinary context. I connect Habermas’ three interests (instrumental, interpretive, and emancipatory) to Hutchings’ taxonomy of SoTL questions (what works? what is? and what could be?) and to three basic paradigms of inquiry (normative, interpretive, and critical realist). These connections show how philosophy of science in the form of Habermas’ critical theory can combine with existing conceptual literature on SoTL and established paradigms of inquiry that exist independently of the disciplines. I aim to show that we can use philosophy of science to conceptualize SoTL in a way that allows it to stand fully on its own merits, as its own form of inquiry, with disciplinary perspectives only influencing it in appropriate and useful ways

The rapid transition from campus to online teaching–how are students’ perception of learning experiences affected?

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a global disruption to higher education, especially in engineering education, where many teaching and learning activities are difficult or impossible to conduct online. This study examines the changes in the students’ experiences of this disruption using a 26-item process-oriented course experience questionnaire (CEQ) that was already in use in the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University (LTH), rather than a newly created pandemic questionnaire. This allowed results from spring 2020 to be compared with corresponding data for 2017–2019. Overall, the students expressed lower satisfaction with their courses, indicated they received less feedback and fewer valuable comments, and found it harder to understand the expectations and standards of work. On the positive side, students reported that assessment was less about facts and more about in-depth understanding. By gender, male students were overall more negative to the experience of online learning, whereas female students appeared better able to benefit from the shift to online learning. Our results show the great advantage of using a robust course evaluation system that focuses on students’ learning experience rather than satisfaction, and suggest a way of being prepared to systematically study the effects of possible future disruptions to higher education

Chemistry Writing Instruction and Training: Implementing a Comprehensive Approach to Improving Student Communication Skills

The ability of science undergraduate students to capably communicate course content and their understanding of scientific phenomena through writing has long been considered a problem. Effective methods for improving student writing skills are often fragmented and undertaken on a course-by-course basis rather than as a coordinated approach. This paper describes the implementation of a departmental effort to enhance and evaluate chemistry student writing in several upper-year laboratory courses. The program involves introducing extensive writing focused aspects to course assignments and reports and has impacted over 600 students during a six-year period. Student feedback has been exceptionally positive from undergraduates as well as graduate students who previously participated in the initiative