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Why disseminate SoTL (and other) research?

 


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 that one?) and may contribute to a more big-picture understanding of teaching or learning.

3) There is also a tendency for researchers not to even try to publish certain studies if they didn’t get the expected results (or for journals not to accept these papers). This is known as the filedrawer problem because the manuscripts end up in a filedrawer rather than in the public/academic domain which adds to our knowledge (these days it would likely be more of a “cloud problem”). Science is iterative, so it needs to build on others’ work and benefits from more data/results being available. So, even if hypothesis is not supported or the results go against what (we think) we know, it’s still worth publishing. Otherwise there would never be any counter-evidence in the literature and knowledge would not advance.

4) Another reason to publish is that published articles may find themselves included in future meta-analyses, which will further our understanding of whatever topic is being studied. A meta-analysis is essentially a statistical analysis which combines the results of many other studies (means and standard deviations) in order to identify overall trends and quantify common results in the literature. For example, when we look at individual studies, we might find some studies that say X outperforms Y; others who report that Y outperforms X; and others still who find that both X and Y perform the same. With a meta-analysis, the researcher will systematically seek out all studies on that topic and look at whether (overall) X or Y out-perform each other, and if there are other variables (e.g., age) which might explain why certain sub-groups of research studies came to different results (e.g., in older people, X outperforms Y, but in younger participants, Y outperforms X). So, publishing your study, regardless of what you find, will help to inform these types of studies and contribute to a more accurate understanding of reality.

5) Finally, it is especially important for us, as college researchers, to publish our findings so that our students and classrooms are represented in the larger body of literature. The vast majority of researchers use university students as their subjects, which means that we know a lot about 18-25-year-old university students, but very little about other groups of people, including students that are attending college instead of university. This sample homogeneity has previously been identified as an issue, particularly in psychological and social science research, where most samples are WEIRD (Western, Educated, and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries). You can read more about WEIRD samples in psychology in this article. If we want to know what is “really” going on, the more diversified our sample is, the more generalizable our results will be.

            I hope these reasons encourage you to consider engaging in research or at least publishing the research you’ve already completed (e.g., Master’s thesis that is sitting in a “filedrawer” somewhere). If there is anything I can do to support your research or if you have suggestions for me in my role as Research Coordinator, please reach out via email.

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