Research Coordinator Blog

          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...