Somewhere mid-semester, most instructors notice something worth investigating: students who aced the homework failing the exam, a discussion format that transformed one section but flopped in another, a small change to feedback that seemed to shift how students revised. The scholarship of teaching and learning — SoTL, usually pronounced SO-tul — is the practice of turning those noticings into systematic inquiry, and then making the results public so other teachers can build on them.
For faculty at teaching-focused institutions, SoTL is often the most natural route into an active research agenda: the laboratory is a classroom you already run, the questions grow out of work you already do, and the findings improve your own courses even before anyone else reads them. This guide explains what SoTL is and is not, what counts as a researchable question, how to design a study, the ethics involved, and where to present and publish the results.
What the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Actually Is
The modern framing traces to Ernest Boyer’s 1990 report Scholarship Reconsidered, which argued that the academy’s definition of scholarship had narrowed to discovery research and should expand to include the scholarship of teaching. The field that grew from that argument has a reasonably stable working definition: SoTL is the systematic investigation of student learning, conducted in one’s own teaching context, made public through peer-reviewed channels so that it can be critiqued and used by others.
Each part of that definition does real work. Systematic separates SoTL from impressions: you gather evidence deliberately rather than relying on how the semester felt. Student learning centers the inquiry on what students do, produce, and understand, not merely on what instructors enjoy. And made public is what turns reflective teaching into scholarship — a finding that never leaves your office improves one classroom, while a finding shared at a conference or in a journal can improve hundreds.
SoTL, Scholarly Teaching, and Education Research: Drawing the Lines
Confusion about neighboring terms stops many would-be SoTL scholars before they start, so it is worth mapping the territory:
| Practice | Core Activity | Audience |
|---|---|---|
| Good teaching | Effective instruction and course design | Your students |
| Scholarly teaching | Teaching informed by the pedagogical literature | Your students and your own practice |
| SoTL | Systematic inquiry into learning in your own context, shared publicly | Peers across disciplines |
| Education research | Generalizable studies of learning, often large scale | The research field of education |
The line that matters most runs between scholarly teaching and SoTL: reading the literature and applying it is admirable practice, but it becomes scholarship only when you generate evidence and share it for review. The line on the other side matters too — SoTL does not need the scale or generalizability of education research. A carefully designed study of thirty students in your own course is a legitimate contribution, provided you claim only what that design supports.
What Counts as a SoTL Question
Strong SoTL questions are specific, answerable with evidence you can actually collect, and interesting to someone beyond your own department. A few recognizable families:
- What works questions. Does a particular intervention help? For example: does adding structured peer review to a writing assignment change the quality of student revisions?
- What is happening questions. Descriptive inquiry into how students actually experience or approach the work. How do first-year students use instructor feedback, and what do they ignore?
- What could be questions. Visions of possibility: what happens when students co-design an assessment, or when a course abandons timed exams entirely?
- Conceptual questions. Theory-building about teaching and learning itself, often drawing on your home discipline’s analytical tools.
Notice that none of these requires a control group, a grant, or a statistics package you do not own. They require a question you genuinely want answered and a plan for gathering evidence that speaks to it.
Designing a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Study
Start With Evidence You Already Generate
Classrooms produce data constantly: papers, exams, drafts and revisions, discussion posts, reflective writing, attendance patterns, office-hour questions. Much SoTL work analyzes artifacts like these, sometimes adding a survey, a focus group, or short interviews. Choosing evidence you already generate keeps the study feasible alongside a full teaching load.
Match the Method to the Question
A what works question usually wants some comparison — between sections, between semesters, or before and after a change — along with honesty about everything else that differed. A what is happening question wants rich description, often through coding student work or interview transcripts. Mixed approaches are common and respected. Your home discipline’s habits can be an asset here: historians bring source criticism, scientists bring measurement discipline, literary scholars bring close reading, and all of it transfers.
Write the Analysis Plan Before the Semester Starts
Decide in advance what you will compare, code, or count, and what pattern would actually answer your question. A one-page plan written in August prevents the December problem of a folder full of student work and no idea what to do with it. It also disciplines the study against wishful reading: when you specify beforehand what would count as evidence that the intervention did not work, your eventual claims earn far more trust from reviewers.
Embrace the Small N
The most common anxiety among new SoTL researchers is sample size. Set it down. The field values context-rich studies of single courses precisely because teaching happens in contexts; your job is to describe yours thoroughly enough that readers can judge what transfers to theirs. Claim patterns, not universal laws, and the small N becomes a feature rather than a flaw.
Ethics: Your Students Are Now Research Participants
The moment you plan to share findings publicly, your classroom inquiry becomes human subjects research, and it needs review before data collection begins. Contact your institutional review board early; many SoTL studies qualify for exempt or expedited review, but that determination belongs to the IRB, not to you. Expect questions about consent, about how you will separate students’ choice to participate from their grades, and about anonymizing student work.
The power dynamic deserves genuine thought, not just paperwork. Students should be able to decline participation without cost or awkwardness, which often means having a colleague collect consent forms that you do not see until after grades post. Handled well, the ethics process tends to sharpen the study design — the questions an IRB asks are frequently the same ones a peer reviewer would.
Where to Share Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Work
SoTL has one of the friendliest publication cultures in academia, with venues at every level of formality. Conferences are the traditional first stop, and interdisciplinary ones suit SoTL especially well because teaching questions cross departmental lines. Presenting at an online event such as a NIVA virtual conference lets you test your analysis before a multidisciplinary audience without a travel budget, and accepted work is published in the ISBN-registered proceedings, giving the study a citable record from its first outing.
From there, the pathway usually runs to journals — both dedicated SoTL outlets and disciplinary teaching journals — where a conference paper matured by feedback becomes an article. Peer-reviewed venues like the NIVA journals and the many discipline-based teaching journals mean your findings can find an audience whether your evidence is statistical, qualitative, or interpretive. The common thread across all of them: reviewers want honest context, defensible claims, and something a reader can use on Monday morning.
Getting Started This Semester
A realistic on-ramp for a first project:
- Write down the classroom puzzle that already bothers or intrigues you, in one plain sentence.
- Read a handful of studies on the same puzzle to see how others framed and measured it.
- Sketch the smallest honest design — one course, one semester, evidence you already collect plus at most one new instrument.
- Clear it with your IRB before the semester starts, since consent works best from day one.
- Commit to one public output — a conference proposal is the classic first target, and the deadline will keep the project alive.
The first study is the hardest, mostly because it asks you to think of your teaching as a site of inquiry rather than a private craft. After that, the questions multiply on their own. Many SoTL scholars also find an unexpected side effect: designing research about your own course makes you a sharper observer of it, and students benefit from that attention long before the findings reach an audience.
Frequently Asked Questions
SoTL stands for the scholarship of teaching and learning: systematic research into student learning conducted by instructors in their own courses and shared publicly through conferences, proceedings, or journals so other educators can review and build on it.
If you plan to share the findings beyond your own classroom, yes, you should contact your institutional review board before collecting data. Many SoTL studies receive exempt or expedited review, but that decision rests with the board, not the researcher.
Increasingly, yes. Many institutions recognize peer-reviewed SoTL in tenure and promotion, particularly at teaching-focused colleges. Its standing rests on the same foundations as any scholarship: systematic methods, honest claims, and publication through peer review.
Absolutely. SoTL values context-rich studies of single courses, including small ones. Describe your setting thoroughly, match your claims to your evidence, and a study of twenty students can make a genuine contribution that other teachers can apply.
That classroom puzzle you wrote down deserves an audience. Turn it into a proposal for NIVA’s upcoming virtual conference — the application takes minutes, faculty registration is $150, students pay $70, and membership in the association is free.