Book Review: Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment by Terry Doyle (Stylus, 2008)

Excerpt: According to Terry Doyle in his book Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment, “Most important, this book has been written to answer the single most asked question I hear when working with faculty groups: How do I help my students adjust to a learner-centered practice?” As desired, Doyle has offered some excellent answers for faculty struggling to transform their students into lifelong learners

Restructuring Introductory Physics by Adapting an Active Learning Studio Model

Despite efforts to engage students in the traditional lecture environment, faculty in Georgia Southern University’s Physics Department became dissatisfied with lecture as the primary means of instruction. During the fall semester of 2006, our department began adapting the studio model to suit the needs of introductory calculus-based physics students at our institution. A studio course seamlessly integrates the lecture and laboratory courses into a single course, devoting much of the class time to active, collaborative, student-centered learning. An emphasis was placed on replacing traditional lectures with interactive, technology enriched class periods designed around the various learning styles. New teaching materials were created so that old laboratory assignments, very “cook-book” in nature, could be replaced with new inquiry-based laboratories. Assessment indicated students enrolled in the studio courses experience greater success in achieving the desired learning outcomes than those students enrolled in the traditional lecture courses. As of the fall semester of 2008, all sections of the introductory calculus-based physics courses at Georgia Southern University are taught utilizing the newly adapted studio model

Editor\u27s Note

This issue of the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning concludes the tenth year of publication for the journal. In 2007, the founding editor, Alan Altany, wrote in the Editor’s Comment of the inaugural issue: “International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (IJ-SoTL) aspires to be an agent and catalyst for SoTL’s transforming work for a renewed awareness of and attentiveness to teaching and learning, for questioning assumptions and thinking about teaching, and for systematic and effective ways to improve learning and teaching in higher/tertiary education. IJ-SotL’s goal is to serve as a crucible or nexus for creating contacts, conversations, contemplation, and collaborations in connection with SoTL. … Readers are the keystone to the journal being profoundly international in its Review Board, authors, and readership. If IJ-SoTL fulfills its vision, it will be because of you and others like you around the world who seek improvement, even transformation, of student learning in higher/tertiary education today.” Ten years later, it continues to be an exciting time for the journal. Since the publication of the last issue of the journal in January of 2016, Digital Object Identifier (DOI) numbers have been enabled for the journal. DOIs have been assigned to all articles in the present and back issues of the journal. The journal continues to be indebted to its Editorial Review Board, authors, and readership for ten years of dedication and support

Editors\u27 Note

Dear colleagues, The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning is undergoing some major changes. The layout of the journal has been overhauled, giving it a look that better aligns with the quality of the content. As we continue to struggle with SoTL “counting” as scholarship at some institutions, it is important to package our work in a way that reinforces its value. We hope you enjoy the new look! Articles are being assigned DOI (digital object identifier) numbers. All articles, past and present, will be tagged and linked to metadata as indexing is completed over the next year. Review Board membership is being updated. Reviewers play a critical role in maintaining the quality of publications, so it is important to keep a robust board with diverse expertise. Current board members will be notified and asked to verify their status and willingness to continue to serve. We will also be adding new members; nominations or self-nominations for the Review Board can be sent to [email protected]. While many things are changing, the scope of the journal will remain the same. We encourage everyone to continue to submit research articles or reflective SoTL essays. This is an exciting time for us and we welcome any feedback or suggestions that you may have concerning these changes! Respectfully, Delena Bell Gatch & Laura B. Regassa Editor

Editors\u27 Note

Transition

Letter from the Editors

Welcome to vol.14, no. 1 of the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Beyond the usual introduction to the issue, we\u27d like to address the extraordinary circumstances under which we all find ourselves working. After a year where the Journal shifted publication schedules, and thus included three issues in vol. 13, this issue is the first of a volume that drops back to our usual biannual publication. It is also the first issue since over six million of us have been infected by the Coronavirus. We thought seriously about delaying this issue, but ultimately decided against that. We recognized that our authors, readers, and reviewers expected us to meet our commitments, but all would certainly understand a more accommodating pace. However, we\u27re not quite so easy on ourselves, and felt that honoring our scheduling commitments was a chance to create something firm and reliable in an increasingly uncertain world. We have found that this work was not only intellectually fulfilling and stimulating, but it has somehow made us feel more connected to one another. While we are all experiencing various levels of social distancing and isolation, work like this — and that includes reading this issue — reminds us that we are still a part of a community of scholars and educators, all sharing the common goal of increasing the chances of our students\u27 success. As the spring 2020 semester limped to an end and the repetitious days ran into one another in seemingly endless monotony, it was sometimes diffcult to remember the misty past of just three months ago. So we hope that this issue helps you to maintain some vestige of normality, whatever that means to you. Creating and keeping a timeline are two very separate things, especially when the normal order of our lives is so disrupted. The former requires imagination, while the second requires that plus discipline. This issue would not have been possible without the outstanding efforts of our reviewers, who added this work to their myriad additional responsibilities of porting courses and teaching online, maintaining their own scholarly and pedagogical activities, and adjusting to the new-found silence of the campus-at-home. We salute their willingness to work with us to create an issue we can be proud of. And we can\u27t leave the matter of our reviewers without offering readers an opportunity to apply to become a member of our Editorial Board. The secure form for any nomination is at this URL: https://forms.gle/u6eAWFG8ajN62mJL6 In recognition of the new normal our reviewers now face, we must begin to extend our timelines for notifications to authors concerning their manuscripts. Historically, we have tried to let authors know the decicions of our reviewers within six weeks. But this past semester has shown us that such a short turnaround time is too much to ask of our reviewers. Many potential mansucripts for this issue were sent to four or five different reviewers before one of them would agree to review it. Each back-and-forth between the editors and the reviewers eats into our promised response time. A quick review of the editorial response times for a number of biannual academic journals across multiple disciplines reveals that their response times vary from seven weeks to five months. We believe that extending our timeline will help our reviewers feel less time-pressed, and therefore be more willing to accept review assignments. This will also cut down on the frustration of authors who understandably would like to know the status of their submitted manuscripts. Moving our response time to a more flexible and less specific period will, we hope, help us to cover many of the contingencies we may need to address, while still allowing us to accommodate the majority of those who submit work to the Journal. The fall 2020 semester does not appear like it will offer a return to the groundedness most of us knew previously. Given this uncertainty, the articles in this issue, then, look very timely. Considering primarily faculty, authors here address collaboration and mentoring. Other authors focus on students, looking at their sense of self, their ability to reflect on their work, their critical thinking skills, and their perceptions of both faculty feedback and grading systems. Two articles consider technology from both student and faculty perspectives. And at the societal level, three authors address such varied issues as diversity training, incorporating global perspectives, and teaching social justice. As we all redefine ourselves and our roles for the foreseeable future, we know that the Journal will continue to provide you with the research, arguments, and motivation that inform and inspire your teaching. But we hope that we may also continue to remind you that you are not alone in your uncertainty, your consideration, or your commitment

Letter from the Editor

Vol. 12, no. 2 of The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning presents 15 research articles and one essay on SoTL. Ranging in discipline from Biology and Healthcare to Education, as well as more generalized undergraduate teaching and research interests; this collection of research articles provides insight into peer feedback, students as partners and collaborators in research and teaching, flipped classrooms, community engagement, and much more. The essay explores the controversial topic of the relationship between research and teaching, asking if the tenure and promotion process fuels negative attitudes toward teaching in faculty at the university level. Additionally, IJSoTL is now catalogued by the Directory of Open Access Journals, thereby increasing awareness and readership of the journal and enhancing our digital footprint. The DOAJ has links to our Editorial Board, submission guidelines for authors, and web page detailing the journal’s aims and scope. Further, the DOAJ acknowledges IJSoTL as a “double blind peer review” journal. Our expansion into multiple indexing services (along with DOAJ, the Journal is now indexed in ERIC, EBSCOhost, Taylor & Francis, and De Gruyter Saur) has increased our readership and the number of citations for our authors. The Editors-in-Chief have also been revising submission guidelines to facilitate both the submission and review processes. Of particular note, we ask that manuscripts be submitted in one file only, with supporting tables and charts at the end of the file. Here is a link to our policies page for further reference: digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/policies.html#GSR Please ensure that submissions are properly copy edited and follow these guidelines, in order to avoid having them returned for revisions before the review process can begin. Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t again thank the members of our Editorial Board. Their work in the blind review process for submitted manuscripts allows us to publish the Journal on time. We continue to seek nominations (including self-nominations) for the Editorial Board. These can be sent to [email protected]

Letter from the Editor

The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is pleased to announce the addition of a third Editor-in-Chief to assist with managing the increasing submission rates. Dr. Joe Pellegrino joined the team just this month, January 2018. He is an Associate Professor of Literature on the Statesboro Campus of Georgia Southern University. Over the last several years, the Journal has undergone some major changes. In 2016, Digital Object Identifier (DOI) numbers were acquired and applied to both past and future issues. In recent months, the Journal has updated its copyright and licensing terms. All articles published are now distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). (See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ for a copy of the complete licensing agreement.) These changes have allowed the Journal to expand its visibility. The Journal is now indexed in ERIC, EBSCOhost, Taylor & Francis, and De Gruyter Saur. This continues to be an exciting time for us, and we continue to welcome any feedback or suggestions that you may have concerning the Journal. The Editors wish to acknowledge the contributions of our Editorial Board; without their timely completion of blind reviews for the submitted manuscripts, publication of the Journal would not be possible. We continue to seek nominations or self-nominators for the Editorial Board. These can be sent to [email protected]. We also encourage potential authors to submit manuscripts for review. The Journal now has three categories of manuscripts: Essays about SoTL, Research Articles, and Literature Reviews. The Journal continues to be indebted to its Editorial Review Board, authors, and readership for their dedication and support. This issue contains ten articles: one essay and nine research articles. The essay urges SoTL scholars to resist the commoditization of higher education through the provision and evaluation of high-impact experiences. The research articles address audiences as disparate as pre-service teachers, peer leaders, and faculty members new to SoTL, while evaluating instructional techniques such as contextualized writing, role-playing, deterring cheating, blended and flipped classrooms, teaching about prejudice, and cell phone use policies. In short, this issue covers quite a bit of ground, illustrating the depth and diversity of SoTL as a field of study

Letter from the Editors

This issue of The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 13(2) presents fourteen research articles, on topics ranging from faculty onboarding to factors affecting students’ completion of extra-credit assignments, and one reflective essay on faculty resistance to treating students as partners in the learning process. As with our previous issue in this volume, both the breadth of the subject disciplines addressed and the quality of our international contributors reflects the ever-increasing acceptance of the efficacy of SoTL. Countless practitioners continue to demonstrate both the productive nature of reflecting on our practice and the necessity of linking our scholarship with our teaching. With this issue, IJSoTL is midway through this transitional volume, number 13. We’re moving from publishing issues in July and January to publishing issues in May and November. Rather than produce a volume with only one issue, we’ve opted to create a volume with three issues. Issue #1 was published in January of 2019. Issue #2, published in May 2019, is before you. Issue #3 will be published in November of 2019. After this volume we’ll be more accurately aligned with a traditional academic schedule, and so the two issues of volume 14 will be published in May and November of 2020. We regularly review our readership data, and when we looked over our statistics from the past year (May 2018 to May 2019), we noticed several interesting trends. During this time, the 533 articles published in IJSoTL were downloaded over 117,000 times. More than 50,000 of those downloads came from just two countries, the United States and the Philippines. Another 30,000 came from the remainder of the ten countries where we have the greatest readership: the United Kingdom, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India, Malaysia, South Africa, and Pakistan. Of those ten countries, at least half of them—depending on who’s doing the categorizing—could be considered part of the Global South, economically disadvantaged nation-states. We’re proud of this readership distribution. It demonstrates to us, among other things, that concern about the effectiveness of education is not reserved solely for developed societies. Indeed, we could argue that such concern is necessary in order for a political entity or culture to develop in the first place. Rather than resort to trial-and-error or rely on anecdotes, tradition, or acquiescence to the status quo, educators and policy makers in the developing world are looking for evidence-based methods and solutions for their post-secondary institutions. We are pleased to play some small part in that process. Producing IJSoTL, and maintaining our high standards for academic rigor and writing, would not be possible without the hard work of the members of our Editorial Board. Their work in the review process is crucial; we rely on their acumen hundreds of times for each issue. We continue to seek nominations (including self-nominations) for these positions. If you’re interested, please post to us at [email protected]

Letter from the Editors

Welcome to vol.14, no. 2 of the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. We are pleased to be able to maintain our scheduled release of this journal on a biannual basis in May and November. Our May publication was, in hindsight, easier to prepare since most of the reviews for the May issue happened prior to the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelming our systems. This November issue has been more challenging to prepare since the entirety of this issue was produced in the midst of the pandemic. Here, in a rural portion of South Georgia in the U.S., the co-editors were hardest hit locally in August and September and are bracing ourselves for another wave likely in December. But our reviewers, spread all over the world have experienced on-going waves of disease and disruption of their lives. For most of us in academia, the pandemic has forced us to learn new ways to deliver course content, and to make those deliveries multiple times as we accommodate students who attend classes in real-time both in-person and via video platforms, as well as students who are unable to attend in these formats. Additionally, new committees, or at least additional meetings of prior committees, have been needed to plan these new delivery modalities, make curriculum changes, respond to the potential and inevitable impacts of COVID-19 on our campuses, and manage all of the functions of our university and work-lives. On top of all of that, the co-editors and reviewers have added responsibilities for the processes required in producing this issue. In short, it is no small feat that we are able to present this issue of IJSoTL. As we noted in the May issue, our reviewers form the backbone our production for IJSoTL, and without them, the journal would not be possible. While we greatly appreciate the work of our reviewers, we recognize this backbone is struggling to keep up. Pre-pandemic, we were able to receive manuscripts, send them out to reviewers and get a response to authors within about six to eight weeks. That has changed significantly, and now authors are patiently waiting on timelines that are more in the range of six months or more. In short, we need committed reviewers. We need you! If you are a reader or author of our journal, please consider becoming a reviewer, and passing this link on to others who are interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and knowledgeable enough to become a reviewer: (https://forms.gle/u6eAWFG8ajN62mJL6) The articles in this issue contribute to discussions of flipped classrooms, metacognition and congruence. They address learners “learning to learn” as well as mastering content in literacy, calculus and language learning. Some authors address student feedback, while others focus on developing leaders and career tracks in higher education. Although diverse in specific focus, each article contributes to our larger conversation about how scholarship informs the practice of teaching, while the practice of teaching presses scholarship towards new insights