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Library Instruction and Support For Faculty & Staff

For members of MSOE Faculty looking to get a better idea of how MSOE Librarians can better support staff and students

What is SoTL?

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), is a multidisciplinary field that focuses on systematic investigation in teaching and learning. This guide is a set of resources and curriculum for faculty looking to grow their skills as educators through the SoTL framework. MSOE leaders of Faculty Development have created a Community of Practice (CoP) at MSOE and want to support faculty in this area. This section of the Library Instruction and Support for Faculty and Staff is designed to keep all of the materials in once place. Please reach out to the Create Institute at MSOE for more details about the program itself. 

Steps to Completing Your SoTL Project

  • Think about your own experiences with teaching
    • Reflect on
      • your teaching and techniques you've used
      • the courses you've taught and the students you've worked with
      • challenges that came up in the classroom or with the curriculum 
      • what do you want to learn to better engage your students?
      • Conversations you've had with colleagues or other educators about teaching & learning
  • Plan out your study
    • Consider:
      • Your field and interests 
      • The significance of these topics
      • Resources available to you
      • Time constraints 
      • Potential partners and collaborators
      • Access to students, research data, funding, and tools
  • Create a strong foundational research question
    • Consider:
      • Evaluating teaching approaches for effectiveness and supporting evidence
      • Describe teaching approaches and learning methods that students use
      • Unmet student needs, teaching goals, and learning outcomes
      • Are there other pedagogies, theories, or frameworks you want to explore?
  • If you're struggling to develop a research question
    • Create a list of questions to discuss with collaborators or colleagues 
    • Refine these questions until you have one that can be developed into a study
  • Explore Literature
    • Think about developing context for your own work 
      • Gather articles similar to what you hope to accomplish
        • What types of questions do they pose? 
        • Characteristics of the study's design
        • Types of evidence that they gather for their work
        • Identify collaborators with strong backgrounds in education and learning research
  • Design a study for review and publication
    • Decide how you're going to execute your study
    • What research methods and techniques will best fit your research?
    • Will you gather qualitative data, quantitative data, or a combination of both?
    • Gather a list of potential journals you'd like to submit your work to
      • What are the guidelines and requirements for publishing in that journal?
      • Does your study plan meet those qualifications?
  • Consider Ethics and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)
    • Know that many SoTL studies require IRB approval
    • If IRB approval is required - get this done before executing your study!
    • Things to keep in mind:
      • Time constraints
      • Funding or Resources needed
      • Possible obstacles or roadblocks to completing your research
      • Organizational approvals
      • Tools for collecting and analyzing data
  • Gathering and Analyzing the data
    • Once your study has been designed and approved - its time to run the study, gather the evidence, and make observations
    • Think about using a Citation Manager like Zotero or Mendeley to assist you in this process
  • Publishing & Disseminating the results
    • Put your study into a formatted report, contextualize your research, write your conclusions, and reflect on the process you went through. 
    • Consider sharing your findings widely - are there other places to share your knowledge beyond a journal?

Literature Reviews

A literature review is the process of gathering key pieces of evidence on a topic and summarizing that evidence into a general overview/ understanding the foundations of a topic. Lit Reviews can be part of a larger paper or written on its own. 

Lit reviews can be written in different styles, which may include:

  • Summarization of prior work - a basic summary of previously published work
  • Critical Evaluation - Compares, contrasts, and critiques the literature 
  • Chronological - starts with the oldest research first than moves on in chronological order
  • Categorical - Research is analyzed by category & ignores chronology
  • Opposing View Points - Analyzes literature in terms of opposing view points or when researchers disagree in key areas

Writing a Literature Review

There are 6 steps you need to follow when writing a literature review:

  1. Identify & Define your topic
  2. Conduct a literature search
  3. Read and annotate the literature that you have found
  4. Organize your notes into an outline, choose the style of your lit review
  5. Write your review & edit
  6. Add your lit review to your larger paper if necessary

How do I organize my lit review?

Typically Literature reviews are organized into 3 main pieces:

  • Introduction - identify your topic & any major trends or problems that are apparent
  • Body - discusses the individual pieces of evidence you found during your search
  • Conclusion/Discussion - states major patterns or points, this is also where a summary of the topic is discussed. 

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