Kara Wunderlich (Rollins College, now at Florida Institute of Technology)
Catherine L. Williams (University of North Carolina Wilmington)
Catherine M. Gayman (Troy University)
Mirari Elcoro (Framingham State University)
In May 2025, a group of behavior analysts who see themselves as teacher-scholars came together for a panel on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and its connections with behavior analysis. Although there is no unified definition of “teacher-scholar”, adopting a teacher-scholar model involves integrating teaching and scholarship. These academics use scholarship to enhance teaching while collaborating with students and cultivating a culture of life-long learning (Cal Poly, Academic Affairs, 2025).
This blog summarizes much of the content delivered in that session, highlighting how SoTL is defined, how it aligns with behavior-analytic practices, and how the panelists have incorporated it into their own teaching and research.
A previous blog in this series addressed some aspects of SoTL, its connections with behavior analysis, and the value of teaching and education (see All I’m Askin’ is for a Lot of Respect for Pedagogy and Teachers by Elcoro, 2023). In this blog we review some basic concepts and include new stories of behavior analysts who have ventured into the field of SoTL. We hope that our personal stories with SoTL are helpful and inspiring to those who work in the intersections of behavior analysis and higher education instruction.
Image for ABAI 2025 51st convention extracted from ABAI’s website: https://www.abainternational.org/events/annual/washington2025/convention-home.aspx
What is SoTL?
The term “Scholarship of Teaching” was introduced by Boyer (1990) in his report Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. In this influential work, Boyer tackled the wide-ranging and increasing work of a professor. He highlighted the divides that grew in previous generations between work designated only as “research” and other professorial tasks siloed into categories such as “teaching”. Instead, Boyer encouraged synthesis of scholarly work in various areas of faculty life:
Scholarship of Discovery, what we usually think of as basic research, pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
Scholarship of Integration is about making connections, linking ideas across disciplines, and helping people see the bigger picture.
Scholarship of Application focuses on using knowledge to serve the broader community, often through service tied to one’s field. And last, but not least,
Scholarship of Teaching treats teaching itself as a form of research, or SoTL, where activities like clearly communicating knowledge to students count as scholarship in their own right.
More recently, Nancy Chick defined SoTL as “a synthesis of teaching, learning, and research in post-secondary education that brings a scholarly lens— the curiosity, the inquiry, the rigour, the disciplinary perspectives, and the attention to larger conversations—to what happens when learning happens (or doesn’t).” Inherent to SoTL is a collaborative and transdisciplinary nature (Booth & Woollacott, 2018).
The teacher-scholar model mentioned above is based on Boyer’s model of scholarship (1990). The point is that doing scholarship covers a whole range of behaviors (e.g., mentoring, community engagement), many of which don’t always get noticed in most institutions.
Connections between SoTL and Behavior Analysis
Teaching and learning are both forms of human behavior, which makes them natural areas of interest in behavior analysis. Back in 1953, B.F. Skinner pointed out that science itself is a kind of behavior: science is the behavior of scientists. So when we talk about SoTL, we’re also talking about studying the behavior of people involved in teaching and learning.
A behavior-analytic perspective has much to offer the SoTL field. Many of the research questions that behavior analysts have been asking for decades are directly relevant to teaching and learning in higher education. For example, what is the most efficient way to teach? How do we improve students’ “retention of knowledge” (i.e., maintenance) and application of that knowledge in new contexts (i.e., generality)? What is the role of the learners’ preferences? These are all questions for which behavior analytic philosophy, research methods, and data analysis are well-suited. In addition, behavior analysts’ expertise in single-case designs can provide a practical way for instructors to systematically evaluate these questions without needing many additional resources or a large sample.
The Panelists and their Interactions with SoTL
Each of the authors came to learn about the SoTL field in different ways in our careers, and we have had different experiences with integrating behavior analysis and our teaching and learning practices. Below, each panelist briefly describes their interactions with SoTL thus far.
Kara Wunderlich (Rollins College, now Florida Institute of Technology)
I learned about SoTL through my college’s Faculty Development Center. As a liberal-arts institution focused on excellent teaching, my college provided numerous professional development opportunities for faculty members for mentoring, support from other faculty members, workshops, and best practices in instructional design. After attending two SoTL conferences with internal professional development grants, I began working with staff and other faculty at the college to design and prototype a few of my course activities in such a way that lessons learned could be disseminated in a SoTL context.
The last few years, I have been working with numerous collaborators on early-stage projects focused on building clinical decision-making skills for masters-level ABA students. Other fields, such as nursing and speech-language pathology, have explored ways to teach clinical reasoning skills to novice practitioners. Behavior analysis training programs could learn from the solutions and strategies these other fields have developed. I have also recently conducted research on authentic assessment (i.e., aligning assessment measures to real-world tasks of a behavior analyst) and the benefits of classroom engagement strategies (e.g., “Thinking with Things”, as coined by Kuhn, 2022). Through these experiences, I’ve learned that many of our teaching practices as behavior analysts would interest a broader audience in higher education, so long as we are willing to be open to conversations with those from different philosophical orientations and backgrounds.
Catherine L. Williams (University of North Carolina, Wilmington)
I found SOTL while conducting a literature review to connect the literature with which I was trained (behavior analysts researching teaching in higher education and instructional design) to the literature that was read by the population I wanted to support (higher education STEM instructors). Simultaneously, my university began to provide more support for SOTL through our Center for Teaching Excellence, which included many opportunities to network with others interested in SOTL and workshops to develop and disseminate SOTL. I also connect with Kara Wunderlich, who encouraged me to attend the SOTL Commons conference, where I got my first exposure to the general SOTL community.
My involvement with SOTL is relatively new, so my scholarly behavior in SOTL is still very much being shaped. When I presented a poster at the SOTL Commons conference, I learned several ways I will alter my presentation style in the future. First, I will have a stronger emphasis on the conceptual grounding and theory surrounding the research, and less focus on the specifics of the method. Second, there is acceptance and appreciation for a wide range of measures, so I will collect and report more diverse measures, including self-reported learning and social validity. I’m also looking to collaborate more with qualitative researchers who can bring that dimension to my work. Lastly, because SOTL is not focused on a particular discipline, people kept asking me what my discipline was to understand my perspective and assumptions. I will explicitly state my discipline on future posters. I learned these approaches through truly positive and open-minded interactions and am consistently finding the culture of the SOTL community to be really welcoming and approachable.
Photo shows a stack of books, by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
Catherine M. Gayman (Troy University)
I learned about SoTL when I transitioned from being trained at my graduate research institution to starting as an assistant professor at a teaching-focused university. Balancing eight courses per year alongside research and service work was challenging, and one way I met tenure demands was to integrate my teaching and research. Since I had no formal training in pedagogy, I initially approached teaching like a single-subject research design – experimenting, adjusting, and learning as I went. My interest in SoTL grew when I began systematically studying teaching methods in higher education and seeking to publish that work beyond behavior analysis outlets.
In terms of translating behavior analytic work, I have discovered that SoTL journals are often very open to publishing behavior analytic research. One reason for this may be that studies on behavioral teaching methods in higher education can be conducted with larger sample sizes and thus sometimes look like the group designs that education researchers are familiar with. For example, an alternating treatments design implemented across weeks in a course closely resembles a within-subjects group design. Much of the interteaching literature reflects this overlap, with a significant portion appearing in SoTL journals like Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and Teaching of Psychology. My overall experience publishing in these journals has been very positive. In general, reviewers for these outlets have recommended more brevity when describing methods and more focus on the rationale and theoretical underpinnings behind the teaching method being evaluated.
Mirari Elcoro (Framingham, State University)
Facing the transition between a research university (where I was a graduate student) to a teaching institution, is when I discovered SoTL. I can identify the following conditions which led me to conduct my first formal SoTL project: seeking to improve teaching via empirical methods, teaching in a laboratory, needing to publish to obtain tenure, and being surrounded by a couple of supportive colleagues who knew SoTL.
At first I was uncertain about the project because it was very different to the type of research that I did in graduate school. More specifically, I was used to conducting research in an animal laboratory using single-subject methodology and predominantly quantitative methods. In general, the SoTL project involved the use of surveys and some qualitative methods.
I partnered with a student collaborator to design and conduct the study that ended up being published in the International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and it’s titled: Student preferences for live versus virtual rats in a learning course. I shared more about this and other SoTL studies in an open educational resource (OER) titled Behavioral Pedagogies and Online Learning (2022), specifically in Chapter 8. Exploring Connections Between Behavior Analysis and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (Elcoro, 2022).
The photo above is of the four panelists at ABAI 2025. From right to left: K. Wunderlich, C. Gayman, C. Williams and M. Elcoro.
Potential for SoTL to Advance Behavior Analysis
Behavior analysis has a lot to offer when it comes to understanding effective teaching and learning, but much of that work stays within our own circles. If we want to have a bigger impact, we need to share our work more widely and connect with people outside our field. One way to do this is by engaging with the SoTL community—attending conferences, publishing in SoTL journals, and joining conversations with faculty from a variety of disciplines. These kinds of connections not only help get our research in front of a broader audience but also give us a chance to learn from others who are approaching similar questions in different ways. Working across disciplines can make our own work stronger and, most importantly, improve the experience for the students we teach.
Concluding Notes
Teaching behavior analysis is vital for the survival of our field. Likewise, quality teaching in higher education is vital for the success of our community. As those who are experts in the science of behavior, we should be evaluating our teaching empirically and sharing results with the broader higher-education community. This makes collaboration with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning a natural fit for many behavior analysts. As SoTL is an incredibly diverse and multidisciplinary community, we recommend entering the field with humility and embracing learning as a life-long endeavor. SoTL-focused conferences are offered several times a year across the globe (Elon University provides a comprehensive list), and attendance at a conference is an excellent way to begin exploring how your work might intersect with this field. Hopefully, you’ll find your entry points into SoTL to be both as warm and inviting as well as intellectually fulfilling as we have.
References
Booth, S., & Woollacott, L. C. (2018). On the constitution of SoTL: Its domains and contexts. Higher Education, 75(3), 537-551. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0156-7
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered. Priorities of the professoriate. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. https://www.umces.edu/sites/default/files/al/pdfs/BoyerScholarshipReconsidered.pdf
Chick, N. (no date). A Scholarly Approach to Teaching. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/sotl/understanding-sotl/a-scholarly-approach-to-teaching/
Elcoro, M. (2022). Exploring connections between the scholarship of teaching and learning and behavior analysis. In Behavioral Pedagogies and Online Learning (pp. 113-135). A. Brewer, M. Elcoro, & A. Lippincott. (Eds.) Hedgehog Publishing.
Elcoro, M. (2023, October 18). All I’m Askin’ is for a Lot of Respect for Pedagogy and Teachers. Behavior Analysis Blogs: Behavioral Education. https://behavioranalysisblogs.abainternational.org/2023/10/18/all-im-askin-is-for-a-lot-of-respect-for-pedagogy-and-teachers-advancing-teaching-as-scholarship-in-behavior-analysis/
Elon University. (n.d.). Teaching & Learning Conferences. Center for Engaged Learning. Retrieved from https://www.elon.edu/u/academics/catl/sotl/teaching-learning-conferences/
Kuhn, S. (2022). Transforming learning through tangible instruction: The case for thinking with things. Routledge.
Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan.