Conducting your own SoTL inquiry

Framing SoTL inquiries

SoTL encourages us to ask questions about the influence and effectiveness of our teaching on our students’ learning and gain evidence to draw informed conclusions to act upon and share with others. This means that our focus within a SoTL inquiry is on understanding and improving our own teaching context. In this way, SoTL can be framed as pedagogic scholarship, which is different to the disciplinary field of higher education research. Pedagogic scholarship is undertaken by staff who teach and whose research expertise is not in higher education studies.

The table below outlines some of the key differences between pedagogic scholarship and the disciplinary field of higher education research:

Characteristic	Pedagogic scholarship	Higher education research
Overarching purpose	To understand own teaching and students' learning experiences.	To understand teaching and learning more broadly.
Investigator's role	Integrated with the process (the teacher).	Objective, detached.
How the learning setting and context is perceived	Setting/context is somewhat unique.	Setting/context can be replicated.
How participants and educational processes are viewed	Teachers/learners with variable needs/abilities; processes reflect the interaction between teachers and learners.	Study subjects and processes as sources of differences and variation.
Types of conclusions drawn	Evaluation - reflective of context.	Inferences.
How conclusions are used	Conclusions need to be taken in consideration of their context.	Conclusions can be generalised.
Implications of inquiry	Improvement in own teaching practices and students' learning.	Improvement in disciplinary, institutional, sector-wide teaching practices and student learning.

(Table adapted from: Crites, G.E. et al. (2014) Medical education scholarship: an introductory guide: AMEE guide no.89. Medical Teacher, 36(8), pp.657-674.)

Based on the characteristics outlined in the above table, a SoTL/pedagogic scholarship context means that you are not trying to produce generalisable results, prove what is the 'best' method or conduct a study that can be replicated. Instead, you are using a rigorous and systematic inquiry approach to gain a rich picture of your students' experience in your teaching context. You are then using that rich picture to consider next steps in your enhancement cycle.

The principles of SoTL inquiries

At the heart of SoTL is about asking questions about our students’ learning and wanting to understand how our teaching influences this process. This resource includes some very useful short introductory videos about SoTL, which you might find helpful to review. In the first video (13-mins), scholars who have been pivotal in the advancement of SoTL discuss its key characteristics. From these characteristics, we can draw out the overarching principles of SoTL inquiries:

Asking questions about our teaching/students learning

SoTL begins from the questions that we have about impacts of our teaching on students’ learning. These questions might emerge from changes or initiatives that we've introduced in our teaching, behaviours we’ve observed, feedback we’ve received, reflections after session experiences, assessment performances, aspects of our teaching/subject we continually find challenging, etc. What drives us within SoTL is understanding what is going on in our specific and local context.

Key tip: when defining the questions you would like to explore, try to avoid vague and ambiguous terminology. This relates particularly to terms like 'engagement', 'effectiveness', 'success'. Engagement, for example, can be defined in many ways (e.g., cognitive, social, affective - see Cultivate's March 22 newsletter). A SoTL inquiry requires you to define what terms like this mean in your specific context.

Finding ways to answer your questions

This step involves using appropriate evidence gathering methods to answer your inquiry questions. Remember, you are not trying to produce a generalisable study but instead gain a rich picture of your students' experiences. Some aspects you might want to consider here include:

What data already exists or is already being captured? It is helpful to consider the types of evidence that might already be available to you and how or if this needs to be further supplemented.
Are there formative in-class activities that you can use that will provide you with useful evidence and at the same time help your students to reflect on their learning too? You might find it useful to explore some classroom assessment techniques that you could use (see this useful webpage too).

Have a quick look at our Getting Started in SoTL page for links to some practical evaluation guides and cookbooks. These slides also offer an introduction to the Impact Evaluation framework.

Ethical approval: a question that often comes up in SoTL inquiries is whether ethical approval is needed. Ethical approval is not needed if the inquiry is a professional, teaching or course development activity. If you are planning to share the data and results of your inquiry beyond your departmental context (e.g., as part of a conference presentation), then you should apply for ethical approval. You can gain support and advice about this issue from Research and Impact Services. All inquiries should be conducted in an ethical manner whether or not ethical approval is required.

Acting on the learning you have gained

As indicated in the table above, the central reason for conducting a SoTL inquiry is to improve our teaching practices and students' learning experiences. This means using the evidence you have gathered and the conclusions you have drawn to make further changes within your teaching context. For example, you might redesign a module, assessment piece or learning resources, refine a specific pedagogic approach you have implemented, alter an activity or replace it altogether. Some may also decide that they want to extend or broaden their inquiries further.

The emphasis on action makes SoTL inquiries very similar to action research. If you would like to read more about action research in HE, you might find this Action research for higher education practitioners: a practical guide helpful.

Sharing your learning

The final principle focuses on sharing your learning from your inquiries for wider communities to use and build upon. These communities may include colleagues within your department, your faculty and institutional peers or external groups and networks. Fundamentally it would be expected that you would share your work within your immediate context to help inform the development of your colleagues' and department's practices. You may also want to share your learning more widely and there are now increasing channels through which we can connect and share with colleagues across the sector, e.g., THE Campus, Advance HE blogs, National Teaching Repository.

Sharing our learning does not have to mean writing a research paper. There are many formats through which we may write about or comment upon our education practices. You may find these slides helpful to review, which are from a workshop that explored the various channels for dissemination of pedagogic scholarship.

Key point: if you are sharing your work as a research inquiry, you will need to have obtained ethical approval.

If you would like any help or support in conducting your own SoTL inquiry, don't hesitate to contact Kerry Dobbins (Kerry.Dobbins@warwick.ac.uk).