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Scholarship of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Award
 
The Center for Teaching Excellence has created up to four annual $1,000 awards to support faculty activities that focus on the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (SoTLA).
 
This award is designed to give Canisius faculty an incentive to engage in scholarly enquiry that will encourage significant, long-lasting learning for our students; enhance the practice and profession of teaching; and bring the same recognition and reward to faculty members' work as teachers as is given to other forms of scholarly work within the disciplines.

According to the Carnegie Foundation, “achieving these goals involves significant shifts in thought and practice. For faculty in most settings, teaching is a private act, limited to the teacher and students; it is rarely evaluated by professional peers. ‘The result,’ writes Carnegie Foundation President Lee S. Shulman, ‘is that those who engage in innovative acts of teaching rarely build upon the work of others; nor can others build upon theirs.’”
 
This SoTLA Award is designed to help make what faculty do when they teach more public, subject to critical evaluation, and usable by others both on campus and in the wider academic community.
 
The application and award process consists of an ongoing, year-long project. A faculty member will make the application by early summer (June 15), outlining plans for carrying out a research project focused on teaching within his or her discipline. The year will be spent researching prior work on the topic (literature review) and gathering data or evidence that will inform conclusions about the initial research question.  At the conclusion of the year--most likely the late spring following the application acceptanct--the faculty member will present findings of the research in a chosen format (paper, presentation, etc.), and the award will be issued at the conclusion of the project.  The CTE will provide a public form in the spring semester that will allow for such presentations.

Purpose: To encourage academic faculty members to approach their
teaching as a scholarly activity and “make their teaching public.” An ancillary result may be for the qualifying faculty member to join the CASTL SoTL program on campus to prepare a proposal for the 2009 CASTL Institute.

Eligibility: Any faculty member who wishes to conduct a research project
involving his or her teaching, with plans to make it public, either through publication, a conference presentation, or an on-campus presentation, may apply for this award.

Requirements: 

  1. The person requesting the award may be a full-time or part-time faculty member who is contracted to teach at least one semester in the 2008-2009 academic year. Awardees will receive a $1,000 award (minus requisite taxes) once the research has been made public. 
     
  2. The project must be described in terms of the rubric below.
     
  3. The project must reflect the principles of the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (SoTLA). The Carnegie Foundation website offers guidelines and definitions. In addition, the CTE has resources and support in the design, data-gathering, and public presentation activities.
     
  4. The award will be issued at the successful conclusion of the research project, generally after acceptance for publication or upon the local presentation of the project and its result.
Note: publication is NOT a requirement; however, public presentation is a requirement. The minimum requirement for public presentation is a written report published in the CTE Newsletter and/or presentation of results in a CTE-sponsored seminar on campus.

The award application
 
The application should address the following elements in a 500-700 word proposal:

  • Research question
  • Why and to whom the question is important (relevance)
  • Plan for gathering data and information
  • Plan for public presentation (local, regional, or national)
  • Plan for literature review
Rubric: Proposals will be evaluated on the following set of criteria: 

  • The relevance of the research question to teaching at Canisius College
  • The quality of the plan for conducting the research
  • The potential for public distribution
  • The potential for enhancing our understanding of teaching; Canisius students 
The committee to evaluate proposals will consist of the Advisory Boards of the Center for Teaching Excellence. The review will be a “blind” process to ensure objectivity.
 
Examples of projects:

  • Examining students’ achievement of particular learning goals in a course.
  • Using a new pedagogical approach and researching its effectiveness on student learning.
  • Comparing the achievement of specific student learning goals across sections of introductory courses.
  • Creating a new course to address Core Curriculum changes, and researching the course’s effectiveness in achieving the stated goal.
  • Re-designing a course and testing to measure the effectiveness of the new course design. 
Examples of Research questions:

  • What can we do to encourage students to prepare readings before class?
  • Will “active learning” be a better method for delivering course content than lecture?
  • What format of testing is more effective in measuring students’ mastery of course content?
  • How well are students applying their content knowledge?
  • What does service learning contribute to students’ learning in my course?
  • How does changing my pedagogy affect student learning?
  • In what ways to parts of x course address the attributes of the Core Curriculum?
  • How well does course x achieve the basic goals of Information Literacy?
  • What is the best way to assess students’ achievement of a course goal?

For further information, contact the CTE at x3720 or cteweb@canisius.edu