Optimizing Teaching and Learning: Practicing Pedagogical Research - Hardcover

Gurung, Regan A. R.; Schwartz, Beth M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405161795 ISBN 13: 9781405161794

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008

Synopsis

Optimizing Teaching and Learning will serve as a practical guide for anyone, anywhere, who is interested in improving their teaching, the learning of their students, and correspondingly, contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning.

• Bridges the gap between the research and practice of SoTL
• Provides explicit instructions on how to design, conduct, analyze, and write-up SoTL work
• Includes samples of actual questionnaires and other materials (e.g., focus group questions) that will jumpstart investigations into teaching and learning
• Explores the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical practices and present applications of SoTL using case studies from a variety of disciplines

About this title

About the Author

Regan A. R. Gurung is Chair of Human Development at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. He has served for many years on the campus Faculty Development Committee and has also been Chair of the same. He is currently campus representative for a CASTL Leadership Site, and is a member of a national taskforce for the scholarship of teaching and learning. He is author of Health Psychology: A Cultural Approach (2006).

Beth M. Schwartz is Professor of Psychology at Randolph College. She is founding director of the Faculty Development Center on her campus. In February 2006, she received the APLS (American Psychology and Law Society) Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award.

From the Back Cover

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is one of the most dynamic areas of research in the field of higher education today in which faculty continuously evaluate the quality of their teaching and its affect on student learning. Faculty are being held accountable for the effectiveness of their teaching and in turn they are starting to engage in SoTL-related intellectual exchanges not only in their research agendas but also in the ways in which they teach their students in the classroom. At the heart of this new movement, there is a simple idea: take a close look at how you teach and how your students learn, use the same methodology that you would use for formal investigations (be it in the humanities or sciences), and hold your research to the same standards most notably peer review.

Optimizing Teaching and Learning will serve as a guide for anyone who is interested in improving their teaching, the learning of their students, and at the same time contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It bridges the gap between the research and practice of SoTL, with explicit instructions on how to design, conduct, analyze, and write-up pedagogical research, including samples of actual questionnaires and other materials (e.g., focus group questions) that will jumpstart investigations into teaching and learning. It also explores the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical practices and present applications of SoTL using case studies from a variety of disciplines. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for both seasoned faculty and new faculty who are just beginning to assess their teaching methods and learn how to think beyond the content.

Optimizing Teaching and Learning will serve as a guide for anyone who is interested in improving their teaching, the learning of their students, and at the same time contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It bridges the gap between the research and practice of SoTL, with explicit instructions on how to design, conduct, analyze, and write-up pedagogical research, including samples of actual questionnaires and other materials (e.g., focus group questions) that will jumpstart investigations into teaching and learning. It also explores the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical practices and present applications of SoTL using case studies from a variety of disciplines. This book will serve as an invaluable resource for both seasoned faculty and new faculty who are just beginning to assess their teaching methods and learn how to think beyond the content.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Optimizing Teaching and Learning

Practicing Pedagogical ResearchBy Regan A. R. Gurung Beth M. Schwartz

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2009 Regan A. R. Gurung
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-6179-4

Chapter One

What Is Pedagogical Research?

How do we know if our students are learning? How do we know if we are teaching well? Do research methods really exist that allow us to answer these questions? We all realize the importance of understanding if our students are learning and whether we are teaching well. However, the process by which to answer these important questions is often outside the area of expertise of many academics, though if given the tools we could all head into the classroom with a greater understanding of how our methods of teaching influence students' learning.

In addition to learning the tools and methods available to conduct pedagogical research, we also need to gain an understanding of the existing literature in which many scholars have emerged as pioneers in the field of scholarship of teaching and learning. We must identify those pioneers and use the knowledge gained from their research and use that to develop our own pedagogical investigations. When examining student learning and optimal teaching, the disciplines of education and educational psychology provide a good starting point for our look at how to examine teaching and learning. Although we will draw strongly from these areas, we will also be tapping into many other disciplines that focus on how teaching and learning can be improved. As much as the field of education and educational psychology seem to have cornered the pedagogical research market, the big difference is that researchers in those areas treat the classrooms of others as their laboratory. The pedagogical research we will examine puts your own classroom, teaching, and learning under the microscope. But we digress. What is pedagogical research? Why should you care?

Pedagogical research can be easily defined as research on teaching and learning. It can provide the answer to a wide range of questions, such as why a class goes awry, or why students fail to grasp the concepts taught, or why despite our best efforts students exhibit no signs of creative thinking or higher learning. Changes in higher education are also driving up interest in teaching and learning. The composition of our classes is changing, there are different national priorities, greater public accountability, and changing pedagogical techniques (Huber & Morreale, 2002). Clearly, we need to pay attention to pedagogical research. It is the umbrella term that encompasses a number of other terms such as action research, scholarly teaching, and, a term we hear more and more often, SoTL.

By now you have probably heard the acronym SoTL. Some pronounce each letter and call it S-OH-T-L, others So-till, and still others, Su-till (as in "subtle"). Although it may look like yet another of the myriad acronyms that dot the educational landscape, in recent years we have seen a number of publications heralding the worthiness and proliferation of the scholarship of teaching and learning (e.g., Becker & Andrews, 2004; Cambridge, 2004; Hatch, 2006; McKinney, 2007; Savory, Burnett, & Goodburn, 2007), though few publications place SoTL into the greater context of educational research. This introductory chapter traces the development of pedagogical research from before the time Boyer first coined the phrase SoTL in 1990 (there was pedagogical research long before the use of the phrase) to the present day. Along the way we will provide critical reviews of the extant literature on SoTL and also disentangle the many related terms that have been used to describe similar pursuits (i.e., action and teacher research and scholarly teaching).

First a little more on why we use the phrase pedagogical research for describing the systematic investigation of teaching and learning. After reading a variety of sources and being exposed to a number of terms (to be reviewed briefly), we believe pedagogical research is the phrase that best captures the essence of scholarly work that is conducted to optimize teaching and learning. We also believe that this term is less value-laden than SoTL and other variations on the theme. In our view, pedagogical research encompasses SoTL, action and teacher research, scholarly teaching, and essentially any other phrase used in this arena. There is a lot of debate about what constitutes SoTL, and, rather than getting into the detail of that we will focus on what we know about optimal teaching and optimizing learning, and the steps needed to achieve it. This optimization is what teachers care about. Our goal is to show you how to do it in the easiest, most reliable and most valid way possible. Along the way we will also expose you to the results of years of pedagogical research as well as highlight many unanswered questions and issues. We hope to stimulate your intellectual curiosity in elucidating quandaries, which will catalyze both your teaching and your own pedagogical research.

A number of different academic areas explore pedagogical research with an emphasis on research from the fields of education and psychology and the work of a wide array of scholars (e.g., Entwistle, Hestenes-Hake, Huber, Perry, Shulman). Just as a rose by any another name is still a rose, so too research on teaching and learning is still essentially pedagogical research, no matter what discipline the research is based in. In many disciplines, the methodologies formerly used by faculty for research are now recognized as valuable resources to assess methods of teaching. This transformation has only slowly emerged over the last decade but it is spreading and growing exponentially. as general questions of inquiry lead to more and more refined questions.

Multidisciplinary Roots of Pedagogical Research

Research on teaching and learning has a long history in various disciplines and is more widespread than one may have imagined. In a recent review of the history and diversity of pedagogical research, Maryellen Weimer (2006) notes that almost all the major disciplines have pedagogical journals. By giving one of the most comprehensive listings of publication outlets for pedagogical research, Weimer's work clearly shows that, if one wants to learn more about how to optimize teaching and learning, there are many places to look. There are also many outlets to publish your own pedagogical research. There are journals and magazines written for higher-education audiences such as Academic Medicine, Journal of Economic Education, Teaching Philosophy, and Teaching Sociology, and a number of discipline-based pedagogical journals written for educators at various levels. Some examples of this second group include Art Education, History Teacher, Business Education Forum, and Physics Teacher. Weimer also identifies cross-disciplinary publications written by and for faculty in different fields (e.g., Journal of College Science Teaching) and theme-based journals written by and for postsecondary educators (e.g., Active Learning in Higher Education).

As a testament to the (mostly unknown) longevity of pedagogical research, the earliest journal articles on teaching and learning were published back in 1924 with the first edition of the Journal of Chemical Education, a publication still in press today. Many of the journals that began a long time ago started as newsletters (e.g., Teaching of Psychology;, conversely, many pedagogical publications are not published on paper at all: a number of outlets exist in online form only. A recent example is the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (IJSOTL), a peer-reviewed electronic journal published twice a year by the Center for Excellence in Teaching at Georgia Southern University, the first issue of which appeared in January 2007.

Examining Definitions of Scholarship

Do you want to optimize student learning but don't know how to do it? If you have always wondered if your efforts to improve your teaching and trials and errors in the classroom actually have a name, this section is for you.

We introduced the term pedagogical research to avoid the snares and snafus of definition arguments. But as academics we cannot shy away from a good debate. What is SoTL? Is SoTL the same as education research or teacher research? Is it different from pedagogical research? The phrase Scholarship of Teaching and Learning entered the national higher-education consciousness in 1990. It is not that this type of work did not exist before then. It is just that the events taking place that year, and Boyer's (1990) exploration of the diverse nature of scholarship, raised awareness of pedagogical research. SoTL is often referred to as a new field, in which research focuses on the assessment of student learning in connection to particular teaching practices, but (as we will illustrate shortly) research on student learning or pedagogical research in one form or the other has been taking place from the beginnings of formal education. In fact, the view that scholarship is primarily synonymous with research and does not encompass the examination of teaching and learning is a relatively recent (postwar) phenomenon (Rice, 2005).

People have been talking about pedagogical research and SoTL (though not using the same terms) for over a hundred years. The Harvard psychologist William James was asked to give a few public lectures to Cambridge teachers in 1892. In his talk, he not only expressed how knowledge of psychology could help the teachers teach better and understand their students better, but he asked teachers to "deem it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible manner" (James, 1899/2006, p. 9). The concepts and ideas were present, but no term was coined at the time or specific field of research identified. Some years later, in his inaugural address as the fifth president of the University of Chicago in 1928, Robert Maynard Hutchins essentially suggested faculty should carry out pedagogical research on their students (Thompson, Nelson, & Naremore, 2001). These two examples suggest that the concept of SOTL existed long before Boyer popularized the term.

The emergence of the now ubiquitous acronym SoTL is more the reflection of a political uprising of sorts. As the story goes, there were rumblings of discontent in the academy. The late 1980s saw issues such as assessment, active learning, cost containment, and accountability coming to the fore (Edgerton, 2005). In addition, colleges and universities began to take a closer look at faculty priorities. In early 1990 a study of 23,000 faculty, chairs, and administrators showed that teaching received too little emphasis in comparison to research (Gray, Froh, & Diamond, 1992). This project helmed by Syracuse University showed that this sentiment was commonly held across universities (Diamond & Adam, 2000) and led to major institutions such as Stanford University and the University of California System taking a close look at faculty rewards and what constituted scholarship.

Boyer's (1990) somewhat incendiary Scholarship Reconsidered, which used the phrase "scholarship of teaching," was released into this whirlpool of change. His thesis that scholarship needed a broader definition catalyzed extensive examination of the work done on teaching and learning and flexed the political muscle of organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The results are staggering (O'Meara & Rice, 2005). For example, shortly after its publication 62 percent of chief academic officers in colleges reported that Scholarship Reconsidered had influenced decisions regarding faculty reward (Glassick, Huber, & Maeroft, 1997). National studies also illustrated that Boyer's report influenced the reform of the faculty reward system and especially the recognition of scholarship on teaching (e.g., Braxton, Luckey, & Holland, 2002). Most recently, the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE, now defunct), building on strong testimonies at its annual Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards conferences, launched a two-year project that both surveyed chief academic officers nationwide and gathered best practices of encouraging the scholarship of teaching from entire institutions. The result, Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship, nicely illustrates how the scholarship of teaching and pedagogical research is fostered nationwide (O'Meara & Rice, 2005).

The call to give teaching a place in the broader vision of scholarship was enthusiastically acted on by many eager to increase a focus on teaching and learning and was soon supported by a rich body of publications. For example, Lee Shulman wrote a motivating piece in Harvard Educational Review (1987),Angelo and Cross (1993) jumpstarted classroom assessment with their classic compendium of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs), and more attention was paid to developing new ways of evaluating teaching, giving rise to the greater use of teaching portfolios (Seldin, 1997). Near the end of the decade, Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999) at the National Research Council released How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, a tour de force report on what was known about cognition and learning that provided additional dimensions for pedagogical research.

It has been nearly twenty years since Scholarship Reconsidered was published, and today SoTL is a well-known phrase used by multiple national and international organizations such as the International Alliance for Teaching Scholars (IATS) and the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). Labels are empowering entities. Akin to the political force, visibility, and ownership that the politically correct terms such as Asian American and African American gave members of the related ethnic groups, SoTL has provided faculty interested in pedagogical research a rallying cry and a flag to follow. As the following chapters will show, with the publicizing of the phrase SoTL in response to Boyer and subsequent work of his Carnegie colleagues (e.g., Shulman and Hutchins) among others, this type of research has been recognized only recently in most disciplines as a legitimate area of scholarship, worthy of recognition equal to that of more traditional lines of research and inquiry. However as Kuh (2004) notes, this "new" line of research, is really a new spin on what researchers in certain fields of study have focused on for decades. So what has been going on in other fields? It is time for a short excursion into the history of pedagogical research.

The Other SoTL: Action Research and Teacher Research

As previously stated, educators have been examining their own teaching long before the advent of the phrase SoTL. Two major movements, action research (as it is more commonly referred to in North America) and teacher research (as a similar movement is more often referred to in the United Kingdom), also involve the systematic examination of teaching and learning. These investigations primarily conducted in K-12 settings are consequently off the radar of most higher-education faculty but provide many useful parallels and procedures.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Optimizing Teaching and Learningby Regan A. R. Gurung Beth M. Schwartz Copyright © 2009 by Regan A. R. Gurung. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405161795
• ISBN 13: 9781405161794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256