Section II: Reflections on Methodologies and Methods
This section, which consists of three chapters, aims to give readers insights into a variety of methodologies and methods for SoTL research. The first chapter is a research article that addresses faculty learning. It is a qualitative study, but it also addresses quantitative research methods through the discussion of learning analytics. Further, as suggested in Chapter 4, there is often more to be learned from SoTL studies than what is typically reported in a research article. Therefore, the next two chapters are reflective essays where authors describe lessons learned from their previously published SoTL work.
In Chapter 6: What’s the Big Deal about Big Data? Learning Analytics and the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning, and Student Success, Charmian Lam, George Rehrey, Linda Shepard, Michael Sauer, and Jeremy Herhusky-Schneider ask “what’s the big deal about big data?” They report on a faculty Fellows program at their institution where faculty are supported to conduct SoTL research using large, complex institutional data sets. By qualitatively analyzing faculty’s project completion reports and focus group transcripts, they provide insights not only into how to support faculty to use learning analytics (LA) for SoTL research, but they also provide examples of LA studies and research questions that aim to have impact at the department, program, or institutional level.
In Chapter 7: Learning to Be “Fearlessly Creative”: SoTL Research on Scholarly Digital Storytelling, Kelly Schrum describes and reflects on a multi-year project which consisted of conducting interviews with 32 students and 25 faculty members about their experiences with digital storytelling plus analysis of their course materials. She describes multiple outputs from the study, including several papers targeted at humanities audiences and multidisciplinary audiences about various aspects of her findings, plus an open educational resource. Included in her “lessons learned” section are her reflections on the efficacy of her interview questions, which she also shares on her website.
Finally, in Chapter 8: Using Phenomenography as a theoretical framework for investigating student experience with EdTech, Brett McCollum describes both the framework of phenomenology and his use of it to study student experiences in chemistry. An empirical qualitative methodology, this approach to SoTL would be especially attractive to many faculty coming from a STEM or other positivist backgrounds. Methods are described in detail and the chapter concludes with a useful description of some of the “abysmal failures” that do not typically make it into a research report.
By blending empirical studies with reflective essays, this section not only provides practical insights into qualitative and quantitative approaches but also highlights the hidden complexities and lessons that often go unreported in traditional research articles.
