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CASTL- Early Work

Barriers to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Barriers to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Illinois State University include:

  1. Lack of sufficient publication outlets.
  2. SoTL in teaching refereed publications would not count at all or be devalued compared to disciplinary research in evaluation processes. It might be more valued if connected to the discipline.
  3. The Annual Salary, Promotion, and Tenure (ASPT) system is a barrier. “SoTL is nice, but it won’t get you anything.” “Some colleagues don’t consider pedagogical research to be as rigorous as disciplinary research.” “If you read the ASPT document, it says balance of teaching and research is valued, but it’s not.” “It’s because the audience is teaching practitioners, not other researchers.” It could depend on the committee and the department and college.
  4. Good teaching is assumed, but not sufficiently rewarded. People would do more SoTL if it were adequately rewarded. Faculty at ISU care about teaching.
  5. Teaching performance at Illinois State needs to be evaluated in more varied and better ways.
  6. The University Research Grant program, perhaps with the exception of College of Education, does not value proposals related to pedagogy.
  7. Time is a huge barrier. “Who has time when just teaching, putting out fires, doing research, and service are key?” “SoTL can only be done with release time/reduced teaching loads. We try to be like big research universities, but we aren’t given reduced teaching loads and other help.” “We are in competition with land grant universities.” “We have a split identity—we want to be known for teaching and research.”
  8. The values of the academic community are on research. The thought is that “institutions get prestige from research, not from teaching.”
  9. “There needs to be a top down commitment, like there has been with diversity.” “Administration should provide funding, then people will do SoTL.”
  10. “Faculty must do SoTL because they want to do it. There are few rewards.”
  11. “I don’t have time to reflect on teaching. I have to financially support myself for three months out of the year by working outside of the university.”

Campus Issue Name

Student Engagement and Involvement in the University:

  1. What are faculty and student conceptions of engagement and involvement?
  2. What is the relationship of student involvement/engagement to learning and other student outcomes?

Campus Issue Plan

Proposed methods for conducting the investigation include:

  1. Quasi-experiments in different disciplines comparing two sections of the same course taught by the same instructor that vary by level of instructor promotion of student engagement/involvement.
  2. Self-administered questionnaires to probability samples of students, staff, and faculty.
  3. Face-to-face interviews with smaller sub-samples of same groups listed above.
  4. Analysis of existing data collected from such entities as the University Assessment Office, General Education Council, or Learning Communities.

Progress Report

CASTL PROGRAM in SoTL at ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY: HISTORY and UPDATES
August 2003

Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Our involvement in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) campus program began in early 1998. Over the course of our first 1-2 years in CASTL, we have been involved in the following: a discussion group created a definition of SoTL (“systematic reflection on teaching and learning made public”), discussed barriers and supports for SoTL on campus, and selected a campus research project topic-student engagement at ISU. In the next 1-2 years, supported by the Illinois State University Foundation and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, we have/are conducting four research projects related to the topic of student engagement:

  • Jack Chizmar (Economics) and Doug Turco (Health, Physical Education and Recreation) are analyzing their data in a quasi-experiment looking at the impact of graded vs. ungraded homework on participation (one measure of engagement), course grade, and other measures. Dr. Chizmar is in the process of submitting an article for publication.
  • Val Farmer-Dougan (Psychology) and psychology student David James conducted a Web questionnaire study of Illinois State University students’ engagement and the correlates of engagement. A brief article on the results of this study appeared in the October 2000 issue of the CAT newsletter, the CATalyst.
  • Sociology professor Tom Gershick and Sociology graduate student Lana Berardi are in the process of conducting qualitative interviews with about 20 Illinois State University instructors and faculty members investigating their perceptions of student engagement and how engagement can be enhanced to improve teaching and learning. Ms. Berardi will be using the data for her Masters Thesis. The will also be presenting their research in April 2001 at the Midwest Sociological Society annual meetings.
  • Finally, Wendy Troxel and Jamie Young (UAO) are looking at data (secondary analysis) from our students who participated in the National Survey on Student Engagement. They have made local presentations thus far.

In 2001, the Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, with the assistance of two faculty members, received a $5,000 “Going Public” small grant from the American Association of Higher Education. This grant helped us to disseminate knowledge obtained from our research on student engagement for the CASTL Campus Program. The October 2000 and October 2001 issues of the CATalyst focused on student engagement and CASTL work. This was distributed on-campus to over 2,000 people and to teaching centers around the nation via a newsletter exchange, and posted on our Web site.

  1. We our held a full-day conference on the topic open to faculty and staff from ISU and other institutions. This occurred on July 18, 2001. Registration was limited to 60 people; 24 of these were from other Illinois institutions of higher education.
  2. We created a poster about our CASTL and Going Public work. Dr. Turco presented this at AAHE in March 2000 and Kathleen McKinney presented this at a Sociology conference in April 2000. Dr. McKinney has also submitted a proposal to the AAHE 2002 meetings (March) to present our student engagement research.
  3. We held (for about a year) a Web Board discussion on student engagement research open to anyone on- and off-campus.
  4. We have also posted updates on our campus program as well as our detailed response to the self-assessment “mapping exercise” to the AAHE CASTL Web Center.
  5. The CAT director was asked to write an update on our CASTL etc. work to appear in the November or December 2001 issue of the AAHE Bulletin.
  6. We routinely conduct internal presentations or workshops on our CASTL work, student engagement, classroom assessment, and SoTL more broadly as part of regular programming, university teaching workshops, and our annual Teaching-Learning Symposium.

In 2002, the Cross Chair in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning was established.

In 2002, we attended the AAHE Summer Academy. Our institutional change project was “Enhancing Student Learning and Intellectual Community by Promoting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning”.

In 2003, we applied and were selected, along with 11 other institutions to serve as a SoTL Cluster Leader, the latest phase of a joint AAHE-Carnegie Foundation effort to advance SoTL around the world.

2017-09-15T09:32:13.736-05:00 2017