The R. Patricia Walsh Grants in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

1. The R. Patricia Walsh Grants in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning An Informational Session November 28th, 2006

2. Session Outline • General grant information • Overview of Scholarly Teaching and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) • Examples • Frequent reasons for denial of funding • Other types of SOTL research • Questions

3. General Information • Grants are for $4,000 • Applications due February 5th, 2007 • Blindly reviewed by the Committee on Excellence in Teaching • Historically, three to five grants have been awarded per year • Forms and past reports are available at http://www.lmu.edu/cte or through CTE section on Manegate’s Academic tab.

4. SCHOLARLY TEACHING Research knowledge base about teaching and learning Gather evidence to assess current learning outcomes Identify a teaching problem & frame it as a researchable question Implement pedagogy and gather evidence to assess learning outcomes Compare observations with current learning outcomes and existing knowledge: What works? Design proposed teaching pedagogy Presentation Peer Review Publication SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING

5. Example 1 • Teaching Problem: Students could not summarize and present their findings for a business analysis in a meaningful context for the intended professional audience • Researchable Question: If students were provided before the assignment was due with detailed rubrics, describing how the paper would be graded, would their writing presentation improve? • Grant Topic: Designing Rubrics to Reveal Instructor Expectations and Help Students Construct the “Perfect Paper”

6. Researched Literature Base • Rubric Design Protocol ( Huba & Freed 2000) • Collect and classify student work samples • Identify desired criteria and missing elements from samples in exemplary category • Design a table with the identified criteria as one dimension and levels of possible achievement as the other dimension

7. SCHOLARLY TEACHING Research knowledge base about teaching and learning Gather evidence to assess current learning outcomes Identify a teaching problem & frame it as a researchable question Implement pedagogy and gather evidence to assess learning outcomes Compare observations with current learning outcomes and existing knowledge: What works? Design proposed teaching pedagogy Presentation Peer Review Publication SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING

8. Old Rubric (Spring 2003) • Content addressed to the appropriate audience  1 2 3 • Clear communication of the details for the recommended production plan (cost, level of tools used, inventory and stockout levels that can be expected)   1 2 3 4 5

9. Project 1 Statistics with Old Rubric

10. Fall 2003 Rubric

11. Project 1 Statistics with New Rubric

12. The average student would have earned a C if their grade had been based on my general opinion of the quality of their work given the expectations at that time and if no rubric was used.

13. Grade evaluations are better aligned with the general assessment of the student performance when more sophisticated rubrics are used.

14. To assess the quality of your rubric …. • Make copies of all student assignments before the rubric was implemented • Reclassify your impression of the old student assignments after implementing the new rubric based on the same standards and criteria that you used for the new student assignments • Perform a statistical analysis to compare the old reclassified impression data set with the new impression data set that used the new rubrics

15. Example 2 A Dialogical Team-Teaching Model for Philosophy Instruction

16. Identify problem in classroom: Ethics courses teach that we should engage in dialogue about our values We’re not actually teaching this skill

17. Assess current learning outcomes • Looked at syllabi of many previous LMU Ethics courses and verified missing dialogic character • Lots of conversations with colleagues

18. Research knowledge base about teaching Literature search • virtually nothing on team-teaching in philosophy • was necessary to widen search to team-teaching in the humanities generally

19. The Assessment Problem • Decided qualitative over quantitative assessment more appropriate to this project • Used student evaluation comments to measure quality of instruction • Developed multiple peer-review model for class materials: • Colleague in department • LMU Colleague outside our department • Colleague outside LMU

20. Example 3 • How to include technology into a SOTL grant topic? • It must be proposed as a possible solution for a teaching problem • You must have an assessment plan for documenting whether or not the technology implementation improved the learning outcomes • You should be already familiar with the technology

21. Most Frequent Reasons for Denial of Grant Funding • Inadequate or nonexistent plan for assessing student achievement/learning outcomes • Inadequate or nonexistent review of past relevant literature serving as a basis for the project • Inadequate detail about procedures to be used within the pedagogical innovation • Proposal based on need for new course content rather than innovative teaching technique • Unrealistic calendar: too little or too much work (especially when outside resources are involved)

22. General Types of SOTL Research • What is? • What works? • (Projects that the SOTL grants currently support) • What could be?

23. Questions? • Thank you for coming!