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What is SOTL?

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) – often referred to as Research on Teaching and Learning – is a systematic, research-based approach to understanding and improving teaching and learning. It involves asking meaningful questions about student learning, collecting and analyzing evidence, and sharing findings with others to contribute to a broader educational community. Unlike traditional teaching, which may rely on intuition or past experience, SoTL emphasizes inquiry, reflection, and dissemination to enhance educational practices. 

Expandable List

While scholarly teaching involves using research-based methods to inform instruction, SoTL goes a step further by systematically studying teaching and learning practices and sharing the results. In other words, scholarly teachers apply existing research, whereas SoTL practitioners generate new knowledge about teaching and learning. 

SoTL plays a crucial role in fostering evidence-based teaching, encouraging educators to move beyond anecdotal experiences toward data-informed decisions. By investigating what works (and what doesn’t) in the classroom, educators can refine their teaching strategies, leading to better student engagement, deeper learning, and improved educational outcomes. SoTL also helps build a culture of continuous improvement, where educators critically reflect on their teaching and contribute to a growing body of knowledge on effective pedagogy. 

It is helpful to distinguish SoTL from other forms of educational inquiry: 

  • SoTL focuses on improving teaching and learning within specific classroom contexts, with findings often applied directly to practice. 
  • Education Research (ER) is broader, encompassing studies on learning theories, educational policies, and institutional structures. It often has a larger scope and may not be directly tied to an educator’s own teaching. 
  • Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) applies educational research principles within specific disciplines (e.g., physics education research or chemistry education research), often drawing on methods and theories from both education and the discipline itself. 
  • Importantly, ER and DBER can focus on K-12 education in addition to higher education, whereas SoTL tends to focus only on the higher education context. 
  • For further exploration of these distinctions, see SoTL, ER, and DBER: Thoughts Inspired by a Twitter Conversation by Jennifer Friberg, Cross Endowed Chair in SoTL and Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Illinois State University 

Suggested Activity

Read the website, Scholarship of Teaching *and Learning* from Nancy Chick’s The SoTL Guide, available online.   

Reflection and Self-Assessment

Based on your reading of the above website, why do you feel it was important to shift from the language of “scholarship of teaching” to “scholarship of teaching and learning”? 

Additional Resources

  • Nancy Chick, a well-known expert in the field of SoTL, has written and co-written many articles and book chapters on SoTL. She also co-founded Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the journal of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL).  She has produced The SoTL Guide, available online.  It exists in two parts, with Part 1 titled Understanding SoTL and Part 2 titled Doing SoTL. 
  • Peter Felten, a leading SoTL scholar from Elon University, explores student engagement, learning, and faculty development.  In this video, Peter answers several questions beginning with, ‘What is SoTL?’ 

References

Felten, P. (2013). Principles of good practice in SoTL. Teaching and Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal, 1(1), 121-125. 

Vajoczki, S., Savage, P., Martin, L., Borin, P., & Kustra, E. D. (2011). Good Teachers, Scholarly Teachers and Teachers Engaged in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Case Study from McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2(1), 2.