A note on terminology
These web pages support all forms of Scholarship (see definition on the landing page), however when it comes to selecting appropriate methods we suggest that for disciplinary Scholarship you, and your colleagues within your department, will have the greatest expertise on this matter, so please seek local advice. Consequently, on this page, we focus specifically on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). As we go on to discuss, this is a broad field, so you may also wish to speak to colleagues locally, or centrally, for further advice on any specific project.
Proceeding Methodically - Where to Start?
There are a wide variety of methods that can be employed when undertaking SoTL, and as a result the methods that you employ should be guided by your project’s aims and research questions.
This means that before diving in to consider how you will undertake your SoTL, it is important to spend some time working through why you are doing this and the outcome you wish to achieve. You may find Utrecht University’s Roadmap for SoTL a helpful starting place to conceptualise key stages in your practice.
Ultimately, undertaking ethically and methodologically rigorous SoTL means giving your study the time and space it deserves.
Proceeding Ethically
Whatever scholarship you are undertaking, you must ensure that your work complies with the University’s ethics policies. See our Scholarship Ethics page for more information.
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A Timeline for your SoTL
It can be tempting to launch a SoTL inquiry when you are in the midst of teaching, but this can be deeply detrimental to the project. Doing background reading to understand the wider context, planning the right kind of methods, and obtaining ethical consent for them if it is required, need to begin long before you reach the classroom.
The University of Manchester ethics process can take between two and six months depending on the type of work you are doing, and before applying to this you will need to have clearly defined your methods, the questions you intend to ask, the mitigations you will put in place to protect and support participants, and have an approved data management plan. To be able to devise all of this you will need to have undertaken a literature review to understand the broader context of your SoTL and considered the practical context in which you will undertake your work.
In summary, giving yourself at least eight to ten months to plan and prepare for any SoTL inquiry will ensure that your work is methodologically rigorous and ethically sound. We suggest a workflow for any SoTL might look like this:
SoTL Methods: Literature Review
An important starting point in any SoTL is to understand what work has taken place already in order to situate your study in relation to this and articulate what it will contribute to the debate. Even if your work is something completely new, confirming that this is the case, and understanding why the work has not been undertaken before and why it is now needed, will all help and shape your inquiry.
As per any academic literature review, searching key words in resources such as academic databases, the University of Manchester Library Seach and Google Scholar can all be helpful. In addition, you may wish to consult the National Teaching Repository and AdvanceHE’s Knowledge Hub where a variety of reports and resources can be found. For some teaching and learning topics a simple web search can also be valuable because higher education institutions may have undertaken their own SoTL or developed their own resources that have not been published in other formats.
Key academic journals around teaching and learning in Higher Education are summarised here and a broader summary with some subject specific education journals can be found here
SoTL Methods: Quantitative or Qualitative?
There are no right or wrong methods for undertaking SoTL. In fact, a wide variety of methods can be employed, and often a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative approaches may be needed together. The methods that you employ should be guided by your project’s aims and the questions you intend to investigate, and you may also have specific disciplinary methodological expertise that can also be employed.
Deakin University advise asking yourself the following questions, combined with a consideration of methodologies that you encounter in your literature review, in order to help narrow down the best methodology for your SoTL:
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What problem or topic or issue do I want to investigate?
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What does the literature say about it?
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What disciplinary research expertise do I have that could shape my approach?
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What kind of data would best answer my research questions?
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What methods of data collection would best match answering the problem?
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What theoretical or philosophical stance informs my methodology?
SoTL methods include; action research, auto-ethnography, analysis of case studies (these could be fictional, semi-fictional, or autoethnographic), content/discourse/text analysis of student work/student reflections/teaching reflections, correlational analysis, experiments and quasi-experiment, focus groups, interviews, longitudinal tracking, observational research, questionnaires or surveys, secondary analysis of institutional or similar data, think-alouds.
For further reading about SoTL methods you may find the following book helpful:
Yeo, M., Miller-Young, J., & Manarin, K. (2023) SoTL Research Methodologies: A Guide to Conceptualizing and Conducting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003447054
For Arts and Humanities methods, you may find this short video from Elon University’s Centre for Engaged Learning helpful. For Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths SoTL methods you may find the Open University’s SoTL in STEM free online course helpful