>newground
Biology Professor Craig Nelson teaches evolution at IUB
In an office lined with human skulls and eye-level mounds of paper, biology Professor Craig Nelson speaks animatedly about the recent research he has done. It is not the research on sex-determination of turtles or the mating strategies of frogs. It is research on the way the students in his own classes learn and how they can learn more effectively.
Nelson is one of many faculty across the Bloomington campus who come together from a variety of disciplines and schools to participate in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning program (SOTL). This faculty-centered program has been guided by joint efforts of both the research and teaching support branches of the administration. The program recently received the 2003 Theodore M. Hesburgh Award, sponsored by TIAA-CREF, developed to recognize faculty development programs that enhance undergraduate teaching and learning and to encourage the formation of such programs across the US.
Shortly following this award, three additional IU faculty members—more than from any other university—were named Carnegie Scholars for 2003-4 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Five IU faculty have previously been named in the six-year history of the award. Most have been actively engaged in the SOTL program. “The IU Bloomington program is an impressive program,” said Herbert Allison, chairman, president, and CEO of TIAA-CREF. “It has become a model for other colleges and universities across the country.”
The SOTL Initiative
With SOTL, IU Bloomington is in fact at the international forefront of a new movement that directs faculty research efforts toward improving student learning. Faculty members ask questions about their teaching, conduct research to explore the answers, and make changes in their teaching based on what they find. They follow this up with questions of how changes made as a result of their research are working. Through such evidence-based research, they have made important breakthroughs in their understanding of the kind of teaching that leads to effective student learning.
Professor Nelson himself is among the leaders of the SOTL program on the campus and widely recognized for his work on improving undergraduate teaching. In 2000 Nelson was named "U.S. Professor of the Year" among research universities by the Carnegie Foundation. He is currently the chair of a founding fellows committee for the new Mack Center for inquiry on teaching and learning, set up to help keep SOTL on a sound financial footing and to further develop SOTL initiatives on all eight campuses.
SOTL in Practice
Nelson explains the enormous impact that SOTL has had on his own teaching. As a teacher of evolution at IUB since 1966 he has observed that students’ beliefs about evolution on entering the course can affect their ability to learn the topic. Students who do not accept the theory at the outset tend to get lower grades than those who do.
To address the problem, Nelson does not compromise the science. “The evidence in favor of evolution is solid,” he says emphatically. “You can no more deny it than you can deny the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. The question we need to ask is, ‘When are we inclined (like the students in this course) to reject a very probable hypothesis?’ And the answer is that everyday life is full of instances in which we do just that.” This realization opens up new ways of approaching the dilemma of why some people have trouble accepting evolution. And its implications can be applied to many other topics and courses across the university.
By systematically studying his own teaching and examining what enabled students of different views to learn, Nelson redesigned the course to make it more accessible to students with diverse backgrounds. He now finds that students who initially were the most skeptical of evolution do as well or better than the students who already accepted evolution when the course began.
Creating and Sharing New Knowledge
SOTL is charting new territory by bringing professors’ own research skills to bear on questions of teaching and learning. As Jean Sept, a professor of anthropology and associate dean of the faculties who oversees the program explains, “Faculty are engaged not merely in ‘how to teach’ exercises, but in creating new research knowledge related to higher education practice in different disciplines, and they are committed to sharing this knowledge with their colleagues.”
At the heart of the SOTL program are colloquia where faculty share their findings with their colleagues. They have been remarkably successful. Since 1999-2000, SOTL has sponsored 45 “main events.” Attendance has grown steadily from year to year. To date, well over 2,000 individuals have attended, representing 109 departments, programs, and campus offices.
The presentations are as varied as the faculty presenting them. To list a few examples:
Other topics have included new data on how students use textbooks; the latest scientific findings on how people learn; and the impact the SOTL program is having on the next generation of scholars.
The Need for Funding
If up and running expeditiously, the Mack Center will be the first of its kind in the nation, further setting IU off as an intellectual leader in this new arena. But a secure source of private funding is needed to help protect the infrastructure of the program, to support expanded projects on all eight campuses, and to fund faculty lines and endowed chairs devoted to SOTL. IU has a significant head-start, but Michigan, Illinois, and other universities are now developing parallel programs and some have already dedicated several faculty lines or endowed chairs to this effort.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning initiative holds out the promise of a profound change in undergraduate learning at IU and in the culture of teaching among its faculty. As Nelson observes, “This is the most engagement I’ve seen in any faculty development program since 1966, and it is the program that is most centrally and effectively involved in making teaching better. What other effort is as central to IU’s mission as searching out new ways to improve student learning?”
>Liz Rosdeitcher
Learn more SOTL. Read about the Hesburgh Award, and the recipients of the Carnegie Scholars Award.
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