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SoTL Support at the “Best” Undergraduate Teaching Institutions

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Abstract

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), whose primary purpose is to improve teaching and learning, has a powerful potential to strengthen educational quality in postsecondary institutions, yet the relationship between a single institution’s teaching effectiveness and SoTL support is understudied. We examined evidence for SoTL support at 78 research institutions identified for “best teaching” to address this gap. Our findings paint an ambiguous picture of this relationship: over 80% of institutions had some evidence of SoTL support, but less than 20% of institutions formally identified SoTL within their faculty handbooks. Institutions provided several different types of support (e.g., electronic resources, grant support, SoTL learning communities); large, public institutions were most likely to offer more and a wider variety of support than smaller, private institutions. Most SoTL evidence was found within an institution’s center for teaching and learning (CTLs), illustrating the important role of these centers in supporting SoTL efforts. Almost three quarters of institutions ranked in the first tier best teaching provided support through a CTL, but they were less likely than their peers in the second tier to acknowledge SoTL in their faculty handbook. Overall, institutions provided support for SoTL but we could not identify a clear connection between SoTL evidence and teaching and learning quality.

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Data Availability

This study used publicly available data from institutional websites. No Institutional Review Board approval was needed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Ann M. Gansemer-Topf, Amarjargal Mendee, Yiqi Liang & Naifa Alqahtani

  2. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Barbara Kensington-Miller

Authors
  1. Ann M. Gansemer-Topf
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  2. Amarjargal Mendee
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  3. Yiqi Liang
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  4. Barbara Kensington-Miller
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  5. Naifa Alqahtani
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Ann M. Gansemer-Topf, Amarjargal Mendee and Yiqi Liang. Barbara Kensington-Miller provided a rough draft of the literature review. Naifa Alqahtani assisted with data collection. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Ann Gansemer-Topf and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ann M. Gansemer-Topf.

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Gansemer-Topf, A.M., Mendee, A., Liang, Y. et al. SoTL Support at the “Best” Undergraduate Teaching Institutions. Innov High Educ 48, 991–1007 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-023-09657-6

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