'The primary goal of being a scholar in SoTL is the promotion and adoption of evidence based practice. 'Disruption', 'transformation', 'change,' etc. should be incidental to this & managed/mitigated appropriately. They should not be pursued for their own sake'. Penn, P. (2020) 'The Psychology of Effective Studying: How to Succeed in Your Degree'. Routledge.

Resources:

• Open University annual 'Innovating Pedagogy' reports - on (new?) forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world

• The Library hold a collection of short SEDA (Staff and Educational Development Association) special publications. 'SEDA Specials is a series of relatively short monographs on up-to-the-minute topics in higher education. They bring you the distilled experience and opinions of leading practitioners in a form which is designed to facilitate easy assimilation by hard-pressed staff'.

'Active' learning (or engagement):

'Engagement is thinking, applying, schema assimilation and accommodation, questioning, predicting, etc... The most important aspect of engagement is the mental work you do with the material; attempting to recognize or recall information and apply this knowledge in other scenarios, for example. “The students look engaged” is a poor proxy for engagement. Engagement is what the brain attends to... an act of mental commitment to a given task'. https://theeffortfuleducator.com/2018/03/02/engagement-in-the-classroom/

As Barshay notes 'One common misunderstanding, according to the report, is mistaking student engagement for learning.'

In their article Hendrick & Heal add ‘learning and performance are not the same thing. Performance is short-term...while learning is long-term...engagement is often a poor proxy for learning.’

Similarly, Vaughn et al. (2022), illustrate that 'fun' is also a poor proxy for learning. 'Although the consonants-only trial produced the worst performance, participants rated that trial as the most effective, the most fun, and the trial they would use from now on'.

Neil Mosley stresses that ‘One of the most concerning things I see in learning design is that people have so bought into a particular understanding of active learning, and perhaps most importantly a rejection of a construct sometimes referred to as didactic teaching or passive learning, that there's this impulse to unthinkingly scatter courses with activities and interactions that are solely justified by this overarching orthodoxy and not by whether the type of activity and the placement of it in a learning journey has a strong rationale for being there relative to the aims and desired outcomes of a course, or what might constitute good evidence for adopting such a strategy in light of what we reasonably know on conditions for learning, one could argue that this approach (that borders on the facile) is as problematic as the thing that is so convincingly being rejected’. Mosley, N. (2022) [Twitter] Tuesday 25 October. Available at: https://twitter.com/neilmosley5/status/1585023620232847360

Bibliography:

Barshay, J. (2020) 'Student teachers fail test about how kids learn, nonprofit finds' in The Hechinger Report.

Colvin Clark, R. and Mayer, R. E. (2008) 'Learning by viewing versus learning by doing: evidence-based guidelines for principled learning environments'. Performance Improvement, vol. 47, no. 9. International Society for Performance Improvement Published online in Wiley InterScience. DOI: 10.1002/pfi.20028

Hendrick, C., and Heal, J. (2020) 'Just because they're engaged, it doesn't mean they're learning'. Impact Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching.

Vaughn, K.E., Fitzgerald, G., Hood, D., Migneault, K. and Krummen, K. (2022), The effect of hint strength on the benefits of retrieval practice. Applied Cognitive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3929