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Scholarly Communication

New Issue of The Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (JoSoTL) Published

The Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (JoSoTL) has published a new issue for October, 2019. The IU Libraries host over 60 issues of JoSoTL open access, dating back to 2001.

JoSoTL focuses on publishing rigorous, data-driven research, along with innovative case studies, essays, critiques, and articles that “contribute to deeper understanding of the issues, problems, and research relevant to the community of reflective teacher-scholars.”

Stylized cover of October, 2019 issue

The current issue includes articles exploring various factors that influence student success. “Instructor Response to Uncivil Behaviors in the Classroom: An Application of Politeness Theory,” for example, investigates effective classroom management. When a student is actively disruptive, the instructor must choose, on the spot, between a stern or gentle response to the student’s behavior. In these situations, the instructor risks losing credibility or unnecessarily embarrassing the student based on the firmness of his or her response. This article describes an innovative experimental study of student responses to instructor classroom management strategies. In the experiment, students viewed and responded to videos of classroom management scenes. The authors find that students respond the most positively to stern, direct instructor responses to disruptive behavior.

Another article, “Claiming Their Education: The Impact of a Required Course for Academic Probation Students with a Focus on Purpose and Motivation,” examines the effectiveness of requiring a remedial, credit-bearing course for college students on academic probation. The authors find that requiring a course with “a curriculum centered on helping students identify purpose and motivation” can be a “useful intervention for helping to dramatically increase the retention and graduation of students facing academic difficulty.”

Finally, “‘If They Don’t Care, I Don’t Care’: Millennial and Generation Z Students and the Impact of Faculty Caring” focuses on student reactions to faculty demeanor. Through in-depth interviews with Millennial students, this study investigates student perceptions of instructor “caring” and its impact on motivation. In general, the authors find that students perceive adaptable, empathetic instructors as being the most caring. Student were, for example, more comfortable with instructors who acknowledged the many other responsibilities student have in addition to their classwork.

These articles exemplify JoSoTL’s empirical approach to pedagogical scholarship. The Journal is published four times per year and is available in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

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