In his 2013 book, Engaged Learning in the Academy: Challenges and Possibilities, David Thornton Moore writes that effective engaged learning pedagogies “induce the learner to look carefully at her experience, to question her own assumptions, to place the experience in…

In July 2015, Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning hosted a three-day think tank on residential learning communities that brought together a dozen scholars and practitioners. To learn more about the think tank, our participants, and their recommendations for new research,…

A growing number of publications offer tips for faculty, undergraduate research programs, and institutions about how to support undergraduate research (UR). The Council on Undergraduate Research’s (CUR) Characteristics of Excellence in Undergraduate Research, for example, identifies core features for successful undergraduate research…

In July 2015, Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning hosted a three-day think tank on residential learning communities that brought together a dozen scholars and practitioners (participants are listed below). Learning communities have been defined in a wide variety of ways…

Faculty mentors play a significant role in making undergraduate research (UR) a high-impact educational practice. Kuh and O’Donnell (2013) contend that the deepest engagement in UR occurs when students participate in all aspects of the research process in close working…

As a high-impact educational practice, undergraduate research (UR) can have significant impacts on student learning. UR can lead to better student retention and engagement (Kuh, 2008) and foster deep student learning of critical thinking, effective communication, and complex problem-solving, which…

Last week’s post provided an introduction to what the “habits and values and methods” of the Arts and Humanities look like when applied to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Extending that discussion, Stephen Bloch-Schulman (Elon University), Susan Conkling (Boston…

Although the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) crosses disciplines, one tension in SoTL centers around what counts as SoTL, particularly in terms of methods and methodologies. Although some SoTL questions may merit social science methods, as Pat Hutchings suggests, SoTL should draw…

In the 2012 Council on Undergraduate Research publication on Characteristics of Excellence in Undergraduate Research (COEUR), Roger S. Rowlett, Linda Blockus, and Susan Larson summarize best practices for supporting undergraduate research. Based on “a compilation of the experiences of CUR in…

When the Center for Engaged Learning releases calls for applications for our research seminars, we often field questions about how many people can apply from an institution and how the multi-institutional research seminars support institutional research. Many applicants are the…