Coastal Carolina University's SOTL Grant Program |
|
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) grant program is administered by the Center for Effective Teaching and Learning. This award program supports faculty members’ efforts to improve and better understand teaching and learning through their own in depth, contextualized, and evidence-based study. Each semester there is a call for proposals for new projects. The SOTL program encourages faculty to explore their own teaching and classes and to reflect on questions about student learning in a formal way. Successful recipients will be required to share their findings with the University community when the project is complete.
Background of the SOTL Program |
|
The SOTL program encourages faculty to explore their own teaching and classes and to reflect on questions about student learning in a formal way. At the heart of the SOTL concept is the investigation of “what works and why?” Just as traditional scholarly activity aims to create new knowledge, SOTL research aims to determine what strategies, methods and contexts help students learn best. Also, at a deeper level, SOTL research can aim at investigating the underlying learning processes in students that determine why certain teaching methods succeed or fail.
As a result of these aims, the SOTL grant program seeks to create opportunities for faculty members to apply new methods of teaching, and to study the effects course changes have on student learning. This might involve a change in course content, a change in course delivery, a change in assessment methodologies, or a change in general course policies and procedures. The challenge in this context is to determine whether the changes in a course actually improve student learning.
Deeper investigations as to why and how students learn are also encouraged. Research projects of this sort aim at investigating the mental and social processes that occur (or not) during the learning process.
back to the CETL Homepage
-
|
