What is the SoTL Scholars Program?
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a systemic inquiry into teaching and learning in which instructors leverage their research expertise to enhance students’ learning experiences and refine their own teaching strategies.
The SoTL Scholars Program enhances faculty and student success by fostering a culture of SoTL. The initiative has built awareness of and recognition for SoTL and supports faculty engagement in SoTL. Two cohorts of SoTL Scholars have received funding and ongoing expert support from the Center for Teaching to design, implement, and disseminate a SoTL project. Additional scholarly opportunities for the SoTL Scholars cohorts has included:
- Sharing SoTL project process and outcomes with the campus community at the University of Iowa SoTL Institute.
- Engaging with national and international SoTL experts and learning about SoTL advancements.
- Participating in the SoTL faculty community, which is open to faculty interested in learning about SoTL or who are planning to conduct a SoTL project in their teaching practice.
SoTL Scholars Cohort 1
June Tai
Her SoTL inquiry explores students' experience with storytelling to foster creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking through reflection. This deeper reflective process will support professional identity formation while developing core lawyering skills.
Theresa Bechtel
Her SoTL inquiry explores the integration of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) into simulation-based learning to examine how EHR exposure influences nursing students’ clinical decision-making, analytical skills, and the relationship between competence and confidence. This project has the potential to support a more intentional approach to simulation design and to inform best practices for incorporating EHR systems into nursing education in ways that build student confidence and clinical judgment.
Roxanna Curto
Her SoTL inquiry is to compare students' engagement with cultural analysis discussions and activities in different course modalities. This project promises to show the most effective means of teaching students in French culture courses taught in English, such that they may acquire a global perspective and knowledge of other cultures. This will also help to determine the best modality in which to offer these courses, as well as the best use of TA instructors.
Erin Johnson
Her SoTL inquiry examines how a Global Virtual Team (GVT) module embedded in her undergraduate International Business course helps students develop cultural intelligence. Students work in small teams with students in other parts of the world (e.g., Poland, Kosovo, Ecuador) on an innovative 5-6 week collaborative project. This SoTL study promises to provide scholarly evidence on effective teaching and learning strategies for instructors who teach courses that include a global classroom component.
Dora Kourkoulou
Her SoTL inquiry explores students' experience with developing a learning module while exploring the potential benefits of AI. Through structured activities aimed to understand both applications and mechanics, the study follows evolving students’ and pre-service teachers’ reflections and perspectives about AI implications for pedagogy. She hopes that this project will allow improved pedagogical strategies for teaching AI and other emerging technologies in creative ways for creative outcomes, and will contribute to students’ and pre-service teachers’ AI and technological confidence and preparedness for their future careers.
Alexandra Nica
She is one of the co-leaders of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Faculty Learning Community and was part of the first UI Teaching Scholars cohort in 2024. Her current SoTL inquiry explores the impact of stepping outside of the “discipline box” for her students, in terms of their understanding of specific concepts from a completely different perspective than usual. She uses an Art intervention in her advanced Macroeconomics class to gauge its impact on her students' skills in analyzing visual diagrams in depth. This project will help determine how creatively incorporating techniques and different perspectives from other disciplinary areas can enhance the process of learning.
Louise Pinkerton
Her SoTL inquiry examines the strategies to map new competencies to clinical experiences and to help students reflect on their own growth with each clinical situation. This project will improve the instructor’s process for evaluating competency, the value and accuracy of feedback to students, and student’s engagement in their own learning process.
Lori Adams
Her SoTL inquiry explores students' perceptions about the relationship between AI literacy, research literacy and science communication. This project will enhance teaching practice by providing insights into effective integration of AI literacy in science communication courses and also help students make informed decisions on when, if, and how to use AI in their research communication projects.
Michele Williams
Her SoTL inquiry focuses on identifying and exploring the conducive mindset and behavioral drivers of collaborative teamwork and group trust. This project will enable instructors and future SoTL scholars to craft effective teaching practices to introduce and reinforce key drivers of teamwork while reducing destructive forms of conflict and social loafing.
Colleen Bringman and Nicole Kallemeyn
Their SoTL inquiry examines students’ outcomes and their learning experiences within a project-based learning environment. This project will explore student perceptions of learning in this environment and could determine the effectiveness of assessments within the project-based learning framework
Alison Bianchi
Her SoTL inquiry examines the effectiveness of the rotating leadership model to ameliorate group hierarchy. She hopes that this project provides professors with best practices for creating equal opportunities to learn for all members of student groups. She also wishes to make contributions both to the expectation states research agenda and pedagogical praxis with student groups.
Allison Levine
Her SoTL inquiry explores students' perceptions of the emotional and motivational cost of recognizing of learning about sensitive and sometimes difficult topics, and the role of psychological safety in mitigating the perception of cost. Understanding the ways in which students associate psychological cost with difficult topics will help educators in designing courses that acknowledge and are responsive to the needs of all learners across disciplines and belief systems.
Julie Gros-Louis
Her SoTL inquiry explores how students internalize learning strategies and cultivate a growth mindset throughout the semester. Julie also brings a unique lens to her work by examining how intentional instructional practices as an instructor foster a sense of mattering among students—an emotional connection that not only deepens engagement but also contributes to more meaningful and effective learning experience. Her work highlights the powerful impact of thoughtful pedagogy on both student development and instructor growth.
SoTL Scholars Cohort 2
Adam Brummett
In recent years, Adam has been involved in updating curriculum for the Principles and General Chemistry courses. Adam’s SoTL study will involve creating resources for the second semester of Principles of Chemistry with the hope of helping students more easily make the transition between semesters. This project will help inform what information students retain and need to as they progress through a series of chemistry courses and will shape the support and instruction associated with these courses.
Kathryn (Kate) J. Smith
Kate believes education is about transforming and expanding the way we understand ourselves and the world. She also believes educators play a key role in their students' transformation and growth. In her current SoTL inquiry, Kate is exploring the impact of post-assessment debriefing facilitation strategies on student learning. Several faculty collaborators will provide an assessment to their students and then lead a debriefing session for the test takers. Kate will qualitatively analyze data from interviews conducted post-debriefing session to understand debriefing strategies and faculty observations on student learning.
Meena Khandelwal
She has in recent years incorporated projects that allow students to, say, write an op-ed or even a personal letter, instead of an academic essay - with all options based on research. The sense is that these strategies leave students more engaged with course materials and more empowered to incorporate what they learn into their everyday lives in meaningful ways. Meena would like to study the impacts of these assignments systematically, to see if her anecdotal sense of the impacts is in fact borne out by research.
Jacqueline Carder
Her SoTL inquiry aims to investigate if using a structured reflection tool, such as a worksheet, during clinical supervision improves the rate at which first-year doctor of audiology (AuD) students develops their clinical reasoning skills and if that faster skill development provides students with more confidence in their clinical performance earlier in their training.
Paul Dilley
His SoTL inquiry is to investigate methods for evaluating the most effective use of data-driven exercises, as well as of AI tools in the classroom. The goal is to develop robust methods of instruction in digital humanities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Kristin Marrs
Her SoTL project centers on student experience in ballet classes where traditional structures – the use of the barre and mirrors – are either removed or used in limited ways. She is not aware of other SoTL studies in the field of ballet so she hopes that the dissemination of her research will situate embodied practices within in the field of scholarly teaching and learning and contribute to the growing field of progressive ballet pedagogy.
Caroline Sheerin
Her SoTL inquiry is to investigate what student expectations for office hours are and if there are ways to make the use of office hours more effective. She hopes that this project will help make students' use of office hours more productive and rewarding.
Olivia Croskey
Her service and scholarship interests focus largely on Population Health in the context of social determinants of health, mostly working with the Latinx population on a variety of health and wellness topics. In the area of SoTL, she is particularly interested in assessing the effectiveness of an emergency simulation used in her nursing course, with the goal of understanding its impact on student self-efficacy. This work has the potential to strengthen students’ decision-making skills in clinical environments.
Amy Kimball
She is currently co-leading a multi-phase project in partnership with Dr. Colleen Bringman in Biomedical Engineering (BME), aiming to enhance Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students’ understanding of the Human Movement System through hands-on, technology-driven learning. The project involves reverse engineering of anatomical joint models by BME students, informed by foundational anatomical and kinematic instruction provided by DPT students via narrated slide decks. The SoTL research goals center on designing and assessing the academic and cognitive impact of these models in improving comprehension and long-term retention of difficult movement science concepts. This work reflects her commitment to fostering innovation, peer-to-peer learning, and interdisciplinary engagement in health sciences education.
Dhruba Neupane
His SoTL inquiry explores how students engage with AI tools for writing and revision. The project aims to further understand the impact of these tools on the writing process, with a focus on student perceptions of "voice," "authenticity," and metacognitive awareness. This research ultimately seeks to re-evaluate the traditional writing process in the context of AI-assisted environments.
Krista Osadchuk
Her SoTL inquiry is to assess if tailored AI-chatbots are useful for learning difficult biological concepts. This sounds useful to her, but she will want to know if it is helping students or if it will turn into a crutch that actually hinders their understanding and performance on high-stakes assessments. She hopes this project will be a step in guiding undergraduates on how to interact with AI and not lose out on training their brains to learn and think, and if data shows they negatively impact student understanding, then there is a need to reassess how to implement AI technology into the classroom.
Abbey L. Dvorak
Students created legacy projects through songwriting for families to honor their loved ones who died from substance use in the state of Iowa. In collaboration with the Into Light Project, students created music recordings and music scores, and completed written reflections on their experiences. She would like to explore an arts-based SoTL project analyzing these products to better understand the students' learning and experiences. This SoTL project may offer a rich, arts-based exploration of students’ experiences with experiential learning within a community-engaged framework.
Funding and Support
The SoTL Scholars Program is funded through the SPARC Strategic Initiatives Fund for FY24. It aims to advance support and develop the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the University of Iowa, aligning with the university strategic plan priority of excellence in teaching and learning.