Research Coordinator Blog

  *Can college professors publish document analyses or book reviews similar to how university professors do? Absolutely! There is no degree requirement for any publications (scholarly articles or book reviews). It’s all about the content! So if you’ve read the book and would like to write up a review, you can absolutely send it to a journal. *What does student-generated research look like? How might faculty encourage student-generated research? Are faculty allowed to cowrite articles with students and publish them? What does a faculty/student collaboration look like where both parties receive credit for the work?  It can take many forms- one of the challenges is we only have our students for 1 semester (GAS/PHS), but if you have a keen student interested in research in the first year of a 3-yar program, it’s totally possible. How do you encourage it? You could offer bonus points for students who write a really good research question or include course-based research as part of ...

  I hope you’ve enjoyed the information I have been sharing related to research during my last 2 years as research coordinator, even if they are not relevant to you at this point in your journey. All of my posts are available on my IS Coordinator blog site ( https://drlynnekennette.blogspot.com/ or http://www.drlynnekennette.ca/ ) for you to reference when you need to know the information. As you prepare for summer, I thought I would suggest some scholarly and/or research-related podcasts and blogs. Blogs The Research Whisperer : https://researchwhisperer.org/ “ The Research Whisperer is dedicated to the topic of   doing research in academia . We’re here to help and encourage.” The Learning Scientists (also has a podcast; see below) : https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/ “Our main research focus is on the science of learning. Our vision is to make scientific research on learning more accessible to students, teachers, and other educators.” The Scholarly Kitchen : ...

  With things returning to pre-pandemic normalcy more and more, you may have taken some time to think about PD again. Although you may find an amazing conference in a location you’d love to visit, location should not be something you look for when making your initial list (though you may need to eliminate some amazing conferences if they’re too far away and will be too expensive to attend). So, what should you be looking for? I have some suggestions!   First, find some conferences that might be relevant to your professional development goals or teaching practice. Search for terms like “conference” and whatever your interests are (e.g., “teaching and learning”) and location (e.g., “Ontario” or “Canada”).   That should bring up at least a few conferences for you to consider. Or, search for specific conferences you have previously attended (and found valuable).   Then, determine if you’re planning to present something at the conference (e.g., sharing a teaching te...

  Is it important to disseminate SoTL findings? Absolutely! Like any other area of research, we need to share the outcome of our research for a number of reasons. Here are 5 of them: 1) The first reason is so that others can learn what is happening in the classroom. Research can have one of many goals which include describing a phenomenon (though we typically think of research as manipulating something or conducting a true experiment). As such, it’s important to document what is occurring in the classroom and with our students. Other researchers can then use that information to inform their own studies and build on what we’ve published. 2) Publishing our work is also important because we can gain a more interdisciplinary understanding of phenomenon rather than remaining siloed in our research and knowledge. This can can help us to can get a better idea of underlying mechanisms which might cause whatever is being studied (why did a particular result happen in this classroom but not ...

          How do you write up your findings after a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project? Where do you disseminate your findings? Regardless of whether you’re writing more of an opinion/demonstration/essay-style of article or a more traditional paper grounded in data, you’ll need to be sure to frame what you’re presenting within the SoTL literature- what do we know/currently think, what is the gap/what are you adding to our knowledge, and how it will help us understand or improve our teaching. In this way, writing a SoTL article is not really any different from writing about any other research. But, if you’re new to this area of research (or research in general), it’s an excellent idea to read multiple SoTL journal articles, especially those published by the journal(s) that you think you might like to publish in, to get a sense of the writing style and scope.             So, where do you fin...

  The next couple of topics will relate to publishing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) articles (though it will also apply to most other forms of research publishing). So, I thought I would give some brief info about publishing research articles in general. Here are some things to consider for disseminating research. The publishing process actually begins well before the project itself, especially if you have any co-authors (if you’re doing everything yourself and have nobody else in your research team, then you can skip this paragraph). Determining authorship order and who will contribute in which way (and how much each will contribute) to the writing is an important step. Why does the order of the authors matter? In most fields, the author in the first position is the one who made the most substantial contribution to the project (though not necessarily to the writing, but often that is also the case). Additionally, the first author won’t get truncated when being cite...