Different Genres of SOTL
-Reports on Particular Classes
-Reflections on Years of Teaching
-Larger Contexts/Comparisons
-Formal Research
-Meta-Analyses

Reports on Particular Classes

It Worked!

Important pieces of our expert knowledge as experienced practitioners can be preserved by writing up exemplary approaches to content or pedagogy that work especially well in our own classes. In this genre, the teacher's own impressions of the effectiveness frequently serve as sufficient assessment. The trend now is to try to document the effectiveness a bit more formally using CATs and CR.

Before & After: Assessments of Changes in Practice

Qualitative

The many examples of this genre in Angelo and Cross include a calculus class (pp. 69-72) in which the professor wanted to help students improve their problem solving skills. This example illustrates the process of refining the pedagogical questions and the successive modifications that are often necessary to make new pedagogical approaches work successfully. In this case, the new pedagogy improved student success sufficiently that no student made an F, despite the maintenance of high academic standards.

Quantitative

Group study approaches to calculus decreased the D/F/W rate for African Americans from 60% to 4%. See R. E. Fullilove & P. U. Treisman. 1990. Mathematics Achievement Among African American Undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley: An Evaluation of the Mathematics Workshop Program. Journal of Negro Education 59: 463-478.