Findings on studies that have explored SoTL have reported that educators/scholars involved in SoTL are more likely to report that their involvement has contributed to their excitement about teaching and changed their expectations for both their teaching and students learning.
Faculty who conducted SoTL projects had an increased attention to their roles as teachers and an increased intentionality in the consideration of their pedagogical strategies and assessments. SoTL has contributed to design/redesign of courses, particularly the kinds of assessments instructors used in their courses. These findings reflect the widespread benefits of SoTL, such as the shift towards more learner-centered teaching approaches (Kember 2002; Young et al., 2015), improvements in student learning (Trigwell 2013; Waterman, Weber, Pracht, Conway, Kunz, Evans, Hoffman, Smentkowski, and Starrett 2010), and positive impact in areas, such as informing program assessment and assisting interdisciplinary work beyond SoTL (Bennett and Dewar 2013).
Transformative Benefits
The transformative benefits of SoTL are not limited to individual faculty who undertake SoTL but given that a key aspect of SoTL is to share finding, others also benefit from the work of these scholars. Bricknell et al. (2011) found that majority of faculty members (75%) learn about teaching through conversations with colleagues, rather than researching their own teaching. These discussions have the potential to influence instructional climate and shift the perspective from individuals to the broader institutional culture. Hence, SoTL informs scholarly teaching practice when shared beyond the researcher’s own classrooms. It builds pedagogical knowledge not solely within the discipline of the researcher, but across disciplines.
SoTL can reshape students’ views about teaching and scholarship, seeing it as a symbiotic process instead of a competition (Auten and Twigg, 2015). The classroom itself can become a place where teachers and students investigate how a classroom operates, allowing both to study their own learning in context.
Refer to the following PDF link for some of the most common benefits associated with SoTL: Benefits of SoTL