In thinking about their experiences as community college advocates, Erin Doran and Kayla Lucht found that they both came to community colleges as adjuncts to supplement their incomes--but that a deep admiration and love for their students kept them there. Like so many others in higher education, they fell into their roles as community college…

In this article, taken from the 2019 ASHE Presidential address, Kristen A. Renn argues that to stay relevant and also to influence the direction of postsecondary education, there must be engagement in the will to reimagine the study of higher education. She discusses the challenges and opportunities for the future bound up in the fact that higher…

This article highlights several examples of student affairs practitioners and graduate preparation faculty engaging in the scholarship of practice. In doing so, these individuals merit a designation as scholars of practice because they are conducting research using their disciplinary knowledge and skill to address an institutional problem or…

This SoTL project explored sources of student anxiety and motivation across student assessment conditions of traditional numerical grading and pass/fail grading and sought to determine if pass/fail grading was helpful in lowering student anxiety while increasing student motivation to learn. Results indicated that students scored equally well on a…

This paper calls into question the idea that we can simply think about higher education as a research field and explores different meanings of the term field. It asks whether there are related fields: research into higher education, academic development and disciplinary teaching research, rather than one. The approach of the paper is conceptual,…

Higher education is a field of study. It does not have an integral cognate discipline that defines its extent and borders. Contributions to understanding higher education come from, among others, sociologists, historians, political theorists, economists and students of science policy and cultural studies. These were the disciplines whose exponents…

Nursing educators have been encouraged to engage in the scholarship of teaching as a form of best practice in education. Despite professional documents and encouragement by leaders in the field of nursing, there is very little known about nursing educators' perceptions and engagement in the scholarship of teaching. The purpose of this…

At the 2007 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, we presented a workshop entitled "How to do the Scholarship of Teaching." The workshop had three main goals: to introduce participants to the literature on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and to various SoTL outlets, to guide participants in the process of doing…

Presents a tour of the field of higher education studies, including research on higher education, citing the relevant publication series and journals dealing with the subject, the strongest institutions worldwide offering university-level studies in the field, and the antecedents of the endeavor. (EV)

"If the research in higher education ended, it would scarcely be missed." This is the time when excellent research and scholarship about higher learning and its institutions is needed, yet the study of this national resource is at a low ebb. The reasons for low appraisals of research are discussed. (MLW)

Literature and research on higher education are analyzed in an international and comparative context. After summarizing the development of higher education as a field of study, the following kinds of research arrangements in Europe are discussed: individual scholars, university research centers/departments, independent research centers, national…