In earlier posts, we considered cognitive load and the non-linear ways readers engage with text. Readers rarely move line by line; they scan for relevance and rely on cues to decide where to focus. In this post, we turn to visuals in scholarship, which carry intellectual weight in…

In the last post, we explored how reducing cognitive load helps readers access and understand complex ideas. A strong structure increases the likelihood that readers will absorb and retain more of what you’re saying. In this post, we shift from focusing on…

Clarity isn’t just about word choice or sentence length. Have you ever read a piece of scholarship and found yourself struggling to understand it, not for the content or ideas themselves, but because the layout was hard to follow? This extra effort adds to something called our cognitive load, or…

In my last blog post, I touched on the publishing process as a form of community-building, during which many hands touch a piece of writing before it’s released to the public. As I continue my publishing journey as an intern with the Center, I’ve become…

In this series, I explore how the design of scholarly communication shapes the way readers engage with ideas. Across academic writing, teaching resources, and public scholarship, meaning is not carried by words alone. It is shaped by structure, sequencing, and…

Each summer, the Center for Engaged Learning facilitates week-long meetings for three distinct international, multi-institutional, and multidisciplinary research seminars that foster collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) on focused engaged learning topics. During this summer’s research seminar meetings, generative…

This is the last installment in a series on impact measurement for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers.    The first part covered traditional metrics, while the second showcased newer, more unconventional ways to track impact. As noted in the…

This is the second installment in a series on impact measurement for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers.   In part 1, I discussed traditional metrics for measuring the influence of SoTL work. This post looks at nontraditional methods of…

This is the first installment in a series on impact measurement for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers.   This post is intended for individuals who publish in SoTL journals, contribute chapters and/or write books about SoTL, and/or attend SoTL…

This is the introduction to a series on impact measurement for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers.   Drawing on their expertise in information science and instructional technology, Lindsay McNiff (Dalhousie University) and Lauren Hays (University of Central Missouri) created…