Pedagogical Research

Scholarship Of Teaching & Learning (SoTL)

During my pedagogy course, I learned about SoTL. This introduced me to research-based strategies for enhancing my teaching practices and underscored the importance of reflection for continuous improvement. SoTL guided me in systematically investigating and analyzing my teaching methods and sharing my findings with the broader educational community.

An application of these new skills is my SoTL project where I developed a space physics escape room. In 2022, I trialed the escape room. Upon reflection, literature review, and after discussions during the pedagogy course, two intriguing research questions sprang to mind.

I ran the escape room again the subsequent year and obtained consent from the students to tackle these questions. They were divided into two groups: one aiming to escape the room as quickly as possible and the other to minimise the number of guesses on the locks. A mixture of techniques were employed to gather data that could address the research questions, including questionnaires, observations within the room, interviews, and pre/post knowledge tests. 

Developing these resources taught me effective questionnaire formulation, ensuring questions were unbiased and sufficiently specific. I learned when to use rating scales (1-10) versus open-ended questions, which was a crucial lesson in research methodology. Crafting interview questions and determining relevant room observations also provided me with valuable experience. The study's findings will be published in a research paper, documenting the lessons learned and insights gained from the data analysis.