How do international teacher-scholars define undergraduate research and inquiry? We asked participants in the Center’s research seminar on Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research to share their definitions: httpvh://youtu.be/XTx6G_M-z5k Many of our seminar scholars begin with the Council on Undergraduate Research…

In Writing in the 21st Century, Kathleen Blake Yancey writes: “Today, in the 21st century, people write as never before – in print and online. We thus face three challenges that are also opportunities: developing new models of writing; designing…

According to the most recent statistics, nearly 300,000 U. S. students now study abroad, while close to one million students from other nations are studying abroad in the U. S. In an upcoming Center for Engaged Learning (CEL) seminar on…

This post is adapted from chapter 5 of A. Cook-Sather, C. Bovill, and P. Felten, Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching (Jossey-Bass, 2014). Decades of research indicates that close interaction between faculty and students is one of the…

This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education includes Dan Berrett’s story, “Students Can Transfer Knowledge if Taught How” (subscription required), which features research from participants in the Center’s 2011-2013 Elon Research Seminar on Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer. To learn…

As described in last week’s post, the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer highlights teaching practices that promote writing transfer. These include: Constructing writing curricula and classes that focus on the study of and practice with concepts that enable students to analyze expectations…

George Kuh (2008) identifies Writing-Intensive Courses as a high-impact educational practice – a practice that facilitates both student retention and engagement. The Association of American Colleges and Universities describes Writing-Intensive Courses as “emphasiz[ing] writing at all levels of instruction and across the curriculum, including final-year projects. Students are encouraged to produce and revise various forms of writing for different audiences in different disciplines.”
Yet what do higher education stakeholders know about supporting student writing across the curriculum? How can universities best prepare students to write “for different audiences in different disciplines”? How can general education courses equip students with knowledge and strategies for writing in their majors and beyond? Writing transfer research tackles these questions.

This post is adapted from C. Johansson and P. Felten, Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pages 5 and 13-15. Transformative learning has been the subject of considerable scholarship over the past forty…

Sharing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects online is not a new concept. The University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence has a well established portfolio gallery and the Elon Teaching and Learning Partnership highlights SoTL projects by secondary and post-secondary school faculty – just two examples of SoTL online. Yet what would it look like if the SoTL community embraced online tools to disseminate research more quickly and more broadly, while also facilitating peer review of projects?

Imagine an online resource that cataloged Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) studies from across global contexts. Now imagine if you could search that archival site to find not only the key findings of studies but also rich contextual information about where each was conducted. If you could, through one online tool, aggregate all the SoTL studies conducted in educational contexts like yours, how might you use the data? How might the aggregated results inform your future scholarship? Your research-informed practices?