Teaching Success

Exactly eight years ago on October 15, 2016 I began sharing these SoTL articles, which now totals over 300! You can access all articles at Jace SoTL Substack Page. If you are looking for a specific article and/or create a meta-search on teaching research, please let me know and I am happy to provide you access to my Google Document which is easier to search.

The first SoTL research I shared was on the topic of measuring effective teaching with an article entitled, “A Survey of 12 Strategies to Measure Teaching Effectiveness” by Berk (2005). Unofficially, I began sharing pertinent teaching research articles with colleagues months before including an article on student evaluation of teaching (SETs) ratings and student learning are not related; and the learning style myth. Other early topics included:

Importance of Confusion and Frustration
Encouraging Class Participation
Self-Regulated Learning
Well-Aligned Course Design
Teaching as Intellectual Work
Indirect Faculty Development
Effective Assessment, Measurement and Evaluation Practices
Blended Learning
Redesigning Learning Spaces

Just as with any academic discipline, pedagogy/andragogy continues to evolve and be intensely researched, which results in useful empirical research on how we process information. That has always been the primary goal of this weekly blog - to provide contemporary, timely, succinct research on higher education teaching and learning, so that each of you can align with your teaching approach.

All that being said, a recent study supports the SoTL research, which may be helpful in your continued pursuit of teaching excellence. The article is entitled, “Variables associated with achievement in higher education: A systematic review of meta-analyses” by Schneider and Preckel (2017). The authors analyzed 38 meta-analyses from 2 million students resulted in a list of 105 variables and findings, some of which included:

There is a close relation between social interaction in courses and achievement;
Achievement is strongly associated with the stimulation of meaningful learning by connecting in a clear way, relating concepts to the students, and using conceptually demanding learning tasks;
Instruction and communication tech has comparably weak effect sizes;
Strong moderator effects are found for instructional methods, indicating that how a method is implemented strongly affects achievement; and
Teachers with high-achieving students invest time and effort in designing courses, establishing clear outcomes, and employ feedback practices.

References

Berk, R. (2005). Survey of 12 strategies to measure teaching effectiveness, International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 17(1), 48-62. http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe

Schneider, M., & Preckel, F. (2017). Variables associated with achievement in higher education: A systematic review of meta-analyses, Psychological Bulletin, American Psychological Association, 143 (6), 565– 600. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000098