Teaching Tips are practical ideas or strategies that an instructor has tried and found useful like an activity that students enjoyed or that seemed to clarify a concept. These are valuable for everyday teaching but usually lack analysis. SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) moves beyond sharing what works, it’s when educators investigate a question about student learning, use disciplinary knowledge to interpret findings, and make their results public. SoTL connects teaching with research-minded inquiry. DBER (Discipline-Based Educational Research) is the most formal level. It’s research on how students learn within a discipline coming from theory and methodology. DBER aims to produce generalizable, reproducible findings that advance both disciplinary and educational knowledge. To me, the key difference is the intent and level of scholarly rigor. Teaching tips share what works in practice; SoTL studies why and how it works; DBER seeks to explain and generalize those findings across contexts.

Personal experiences that have assisted a professor to make appropriate changes in their classroom. These experiences have led to practices or strategies that have worked for that professor and may work for others. It follows the principle of what works for me might work for you.

SoTL

A type of study that a professor may conduct in their own classroom over teaching and learning outcomes. Useful to gain actual data about teaching practices and learning results from students. A professor often conducts this in their own classroom to gain insights and publish their findings at the systemic level and public to other institutions, professors, and researchers.

Educational Research / DBER (Discipline-Based Educational Research)

More of a holistic/generalized approach to studying outcomes across an entire discipline (ie. chemistry, math, physics, biology, etc.) This form of research is usually a type of generalization about educational practices within disciplines. Most of the research is focused on how learning is taking place. May not be the most helpful in making systemic changes.

Each of these are helpful in their own ways to better understanding learning and student outcomes. Each one may come with its own benefits and drawbacks. Nevertheless, SoTL has been found to have a plethora of positive outcomes for both the professors, students, and institutions.

Teaching Tips: These are what I have found to be "tricks of the trade." Years of teaching and experience have led these teachers and professors to gain insight and tools that allow them to have some form of success with the students. This might be some form of analogy used for a complex chemical reaction, or giving students candy in an 8 AM class. These are methods learned from trial and error.

SoTL: A more in-depth method of Teaching Tips. Instead of just picking up some tricks and tips here and there, the professor or teacher actively begins to look at new methods of teaching, and at the same time begins to look into how the students are performing, perhaps even giving polls or asking questions about how the students are learning, or how they are doing with the new methods. This allows for quick applications of successful teaching methods and overall, a more "ramped up evolution" of a professors teaching theory.

Educational Research: DBER is just what it sounds like. This is research on more than just a classroom level. This research aims to go through many classes and professors, looking for techniques to generalize and apply to a general population for the greatest success. Granted, everyone learns differently, but we are all still pretty similar, and so a generalized (successful) teaching method might not fit us perfectly, but it will be close enough and have the best chance for getting the most students through. It's kind of like clothes. We have small, medium, and large, (and other sizes), and while the larges won't fit us perfectly, the get the job done for a good majority of people.

All of this said, there are quite a few similarities between Teaching Tips, SoTL, and DBER, but each have their own unique place in helping further good teaching methods.

Teaching tips: How I process what a teaching tip is is quite literally what the description is. As, pulled form the reading it is, "a description of a teaching method or innovation that an instructor reports having tries "successfully" and that the students "liked". So, its a very general overview of something that a teacher has implemented in the classroom that has worked and resonated with the students. The difference between this and SoTL is SoTL is much more evidence and research based where teaching tips is very general .

SoTL: How I would describe SoTL is a very indepth research process mimicing similar processes to a scientific study. THis includes starting with a question or problem, and then trying different experiments, and gathering data from this in order to form a conclusion. With being so in depth and technical this builds a basis for other people to replicate studies and build upon the literature.

DBER: This picks up where SoTL leaves off. So, as I said SoTL is the basis for research to be generalizable and build upon this is where DBER comes in. To me what DBER is is being able to take SoTL research and be able to replicate these studies and make them generalizable so they can start to be implemented.

Overall teaching tips is simple cause and effect with little scientific background, SoTL is specific and in depth research as to the why behind the cause and effect and DBER is building up what SoTL has found so it can be generalized and implemented.

SoTL: The effects of the teaching tips on the students and why it works. The instructor will do research to find new methos of teaching and using many research methods (polls, questions, etc.) to find which ones have the best scores.

DBER: It is like SoTL, but researchers are researching the teaching tips in many different classrooms and finding the best teaching tips for a generalized population.

Teaching tips: This is kind of like a professors "ol-reliable" method. Or maybe its an activity that seems to go over well with students. They pick these up over time and tend to go back to them year after year.

SoTL: This is a much more focused, concerted effort from the professor on gathering data from their students and quantifying what is effective and what isn't in their teaching.

DBER: Is an more general effort from the learning community as a whole to figure out what is effective in learning across the board. DBER is all about large studies and general methods that have results that can be dissected and analyzed in an effort to discover what will maximize learning.

Teaching tips are methods that instructors have used that have proven to be successful. Students have reported liking these methods so instructors implement them. They lack an in depth focus on how these methods actually affect student learning. These tips can be shared from one teacher to another.

SoTL is an in depth analysis of student learning. Professors gather evidence based on a question they investigate in their course. The goal is to report the data back and share it to the public to inform them of success.

Education research is a group that already exists and works to research teaching. The knowledge gathered here is to help other teachers in the same field do better.