A REVIEW OF THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING (SOTL) LITERATURE IN ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE EDUCATION

Atmospheric science education has produced a sizable publication record, predominantly in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and the Journal of Geoscience Education, as well as in other relevant journals. This literature base is broad and includes a variety of education topics, with many papers falling in the category of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), a type of research which focuses on classroom teaching and student learning. In an effort to respond to calls to increase the pursuit of atmospheric science SoTL research, we surveyed the literature to document and characterize SoTL studies in atmospheric science. We performed a keyword search of 5 data bases, which resulted in 173 atmospheric science education papers published since 2005. We developed specific inclusion/exclusion criteria for identifying peer-reviewed, undergraduate SoTL studies in atmospheric science that were intentional and reflective about improving instruction and learning in undergraduate atmospheric science programs, courses, fieldwork, and internships. This resulted in 49 papers for review. We used the Geoscience Education Research Strength of Evidence Pyramid to evaluate the strength of evidence for the findings described or conclusions made in each paper. Our results show that most recent SoTL work in undergraduate atmospheric science education can be characterized using the first two levels (of five) of the Strength of Evidence Pyramid. These two levels characterize papers that share pedagogical content knowledge and case studies that focus on a single course or institution using curriculum or instruction developed by the instructor as researcher. Within these two levels, we further compared research methods described in the papers using features that emerged from our analysis, such as statement of a research question, use of a control group, and approval by a human subjects review board. In addition to describing existing work, this allowed us to document strengths and weaknesses of the SoTL studies and identify gaps. In this presentation we highlight aspects of papers we reviewed, present a framework for characterizing future work, and make recommendations for future SoTL studies that will strengthen the quality of the evidence of claims made by the atmospheric science education community.