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Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in STEM
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in STEM

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1 The nature of SoTL research

In the video in Activity 1, you will learn about the first characteristic of SoTL research: the processes versus outcomes approach.

Activity 1 SoTL research and outcomes

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes

As you are watching this 3 minutes 32 seconds video, make notes on how Gary Poole, The University of British Columbia (UBC), distinguishes the process versus outcome nature of SoTL research.

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Transcript: Video 1 SoTL: Processes vs. Outcomes

GARY POOLE
I’ve divided it into an outcome component, and I’ve divided it into a process component. The outcome component, I think, is the one that we think about most easily, most frequently. What are we producing? What knowledge are we generating with our research?
When we started doing research at UBC with a group of people on how students can learn from the mistakes they make, we discovered that the way they think about the mistakes and talk about the mistakes to themselves was a very important predicting factor in understanding how much they would learn from their own mistake.
So that’s an outcome. And that will affect the way we try to teach that material in subsequent classes, the material being, how do you learn from your mistakes? So that was good. That's a good outcome. And we had a few other things, too, that were very useful to us in understanding complexity and understanding what works, all of that stuff I was mentioning before.
At the same time, in that research, like in a lot of SoTL research, we interviewed students. We interviewed them at some length. And we started by asking them to describe for us a recent mistake they had made. And we asked them to describe how they thought about that mistake, how they talk to themselves about it, whether they had learned from it, what circumstances had increased or decreased the likelihood they would learn from it, and so on. I love those questions.
And I did not do the interviews. It was wiser to have some of our graduate students do the interviews. This was work with graduate students also as research participants. But reading the transcripts, talking with our graduate student interviewers afterwards, was tremendously helpful for us as teachers. In other words, the process of doing SoTL research yielded as much for us as the outcomes.
There are things about that I like a great deal. One of them is, if you’re not completely outcome dependent, then you don't get nervous about your results. You don't think, ‘Well, if they don't give us gems, it will have been a waste of time. If our experimental group does not outperform the control group on the common final exam, we will have wasted our time, both with the intervention and with the research.’ And I've never believed that.
And it dawned on me that one of the things that has kept me excited about SoTL research for these years is that it engages people in processes that I'm very, very happy that they're engaged in. Whether the outcomes take them where they want to go, they’re thinking about, they're investigating, they're acting upon their teaching in ways that, before the SoTL movement took hold, they weren't doing.
End transcript: Video 1 SoTL: Processes vs. Outcomes
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Video 1 SoTL: Processes vs. Outcomes
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Discussion

Gary separates the outcome component from the process component. The outcome component consists of what is being produced and what knowledge is being generated. He discusses an example of a SoTL inquiry at his institution related to how students can learn from mistakes. Through self-reporting by students, the educators discovered that the way students perceive mistakes was an important predicting factor in understanding how much they would learn from mistakes. This was an important outcome. In this inquiry, which involved students as partners and as research participants and co-researchers, students were interviewed by student researchers. They described a recent mistake they had made and whether they had learned from it. Gary mentioned that the educators learned a lot about students and their learning behaviours by just reading the transcripts.

The process of doing SoTL research yielded as much for the educators as the outcomes. Gary commented: ‘If you're not completely outcome dependent then you don't get nervous about your results.’ He says that even if the SoTL inquiry doesn’t yield gems, it shouldn’t be considered a waste of time.

Gary goes on to say that one of the things that has kept him excited about SoTL research for many years is that it engages people in processes. In SoTL, educators are thinking about their teaching; they're investigating it and then acting upon the outcomes in ways that before the SoTL movement took hold they weren't doing. So, the process of a SoTL inquiry is equally, if not more, influential and valuable to an educator’s practice than the outcomes of the inquiry.

You will examine four further characteristics of SoTL research in the following sections.