This exploratory mixed-method pilot study investigated students’ experiences with artificial intelligence (AI)-guided assignments across selected humanities, design, and STEM courses in higher education during the academic term beginning in August/September 2024. Using a custom survey tool grounded in Bloom’s taxonomy, the study assessed AI’s perceived effectiveness in enhancing cognitive engagement and explored students’ ethical awareness through open-ended reflections. A literature review, interdisciplinary collaboration, and iterative refinement using Copilot prompting informed survey questions in order to ensure cross-disciplinary applicability. Quantitative data came from Likert scale responses, while the researchers drew qualitative insights from coded action verbs and thematic analysis of open-ended responses. Preliminary findings indicated generally positive perception of AI, with mean scores above three across all six cognitive levels. The results underscore AI’s potential to support critical thinking as a layered cognitive process, rather than a discrete skill. Students often reported having engaged productively and skeptically with AI rather than over relying on it. Reflections highlighted concerns about query refinement, content verification, and responsible use, suggesting a meaningful link between ethical AI engagement and critical thinking development. Due to the small sample size and reliance on self-reported data from students, findings are not broadly generalizable. Future research should incorporate longitudinal and triangulated methods to better capture evolving student behaviors and align perceptions with actual AI use.
Drawing on organizational development research, this “SoTL in Process” essay imagines a leadership pipeline for the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL). A leadership pipeline is a conceptual metaphor that describes an approach to developing future leaders. This essay argues that by developing an ISSOTL leadership pipeline, the Society can foster the growth of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) broadly through strategic leadership transitions across different roles within the organization. Ultimately, this essay invites ISSOTL members to imagine a leadership pipeline that may ensure the future growth of SoTL.
While national reforms encourage the integration of critical thinking in Vietnamese universities, limited empirical research guides lecturers at agricultural institutions in how to conceptualise and apply critical thinking to their teaching. This study aimed to gain insight into educational pedagogies that engineering lecturers employed to support their students in improving critical thinking. Utilising a qualitative approach, the researcher conducted six in-depth, semi-structured interviews with lecturers from two programmes at an agricultural university in southern Vietnam. Obtained data, processed through the thematic coding method, revealed that lecturers applied three key pedagogies to foster students’ critical thinking: pedagogy for how to think, pedagogy for the enrichment of knowledge, and challenge-based pedagogy. These pedagogies do not simply comprise techniques but also the strategies or principles for their practice. While focused on agricultural engineering education, the study findings offer transferable implications for lecturers across disciplines and policymakers in higher education on how to foster critical thinking through disciplinary reflection and context-based pedagogy. The study also recommends further research involving students’ perspectives in order to fully comprehend how learners experience these pedagogies in practice.
Faculty and students have diversified and refined design thinking over recent decades, and more institutions are using it in the development of transformative learning experiences. The first of its kind, this study examines the potential outcomes of design thinking educational workshops, through which students learn and practice design thinking methods. Tailored for the promotion of each course’s learning objectives, these sessions cover a diverse range of topics and skills. We build upon existing research, backed by over two decades of design thinking literature and five years of data from a university center for design thinking, to share teaching strategies and classroom practices that foster engaged learning. Through a mixed-methods design, this article explores data collected through five years of short-form design thinking “workshop” sessions. We sourced this data from 971 sessions and represents 7,400 individuals’ responses for a short survey provided at the end of each session. Findings are compared to research on high impact learning practices for supporting engaged learning environments. Comparative analysis shows that design thinking learning strategies consistently fostered engaged learning environments. From this comparative analysis, we analyzed the various design thinking learning strategies that participants felt were most valuable. Beyond the analysis, this paper will also present the most highly valued pedagogical tools used in these sessions for readers interested in implementing them in a classroom setting.
In this study, we explore two academics’ critical reflective process as they transition from predominantly online solo teaching work into a shared classroom teaching arrangement, including the impact on their teaching approaches and practices. We employed an autoethnographic and action research methodology to facilitate the shift from critical reflection to collaborative action within a purposefully designed shared teaching classroom space. Leveraging Baeten and Simons’ five-pronged team teaching model, we articulate the benefits and challenges of shared teaching responsibilities through the practices of adaptability, open communication, emotional intelligence, and the splitting of cognitive load and practical responsibilities. We suggest that the practice of shared teaching paired with a formal collaborative reflective process is central to authentically revealing teaching values and approaches and can form the basis for acquiring new knowledge and transforming effective learning and teaching practices. This serves as a powerful means to enhance educator professional development in order to support student learning in tertiary education.
