NAME: Aldy Arianto

NIM: F041231094

SUMMARY

A Collaborative soTL Project

The authors conducted a collaborative inquiry to investigate how their students demonstrated
critical reading for academic goals and social engagement. They gathered comparable
assignments from four courses and examined more than 700 written artifacts in various genres.
The sample size was small, but participation rates were high, except for the Texts and Ideas
course. Students wrote on average 10 reading logs, of at least 250 words each, using the prompts:
“What (is the reading about)?” “So What (does it mean)?” and “Now What (are you going to do
with this information)?” The scholarship of teaching and learning involves ethical issues that must
be addressed, including gaining free informed consent, minimizing the possibility of coercion,
citing student work, and protecting confidentiality.
The scholarship of teaching and learning contains dilemmas of fidelity that attempt to balance
competing goods without clear norms or rules. The primary concern in the classroom setting is
following the research protocol or providing whatever the students seem to need most at that
particular moment. Collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning magnifies these issues
because choices made by individual instructors affect more than just their class. In terms of
collaborative inquiry, team members may have different approaches to assigning reading logs or
evaluating different types of texts.
Overall, the authors' collaborative inquiry provides insight into how students demonstrate critical
reading for academic goals and social engagement. However, ethical issues must be addressed
when conducting research involving human participants in the scholarship of teaching and
learning. The dilemmas of fidelity also highlight the challenges faced by instructors when
balancing research protocols with meeting their students' needs in a collaborative setting.
The authors analyzed written work using the VALUE rubrics for reading, integrative learning,
information literacy, and civic engagement created by the AAC&U. They did not share the rubrics
with students and did not intend to grade student work within an individual course. The authors
examined all the VALUE rubrics after the courses were over and eventually came up with their
own hybrid models for critical reading. They decided upon four categories that are consistent
across the two definitions of reading: comprehension, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation.
Critical reading is more than decoding literal meaning embedded within a text.
We believed that evaluation would be particularly important in critical reading. We also felt that
successful critical reading would require high levels of inference, although the type of inference
would vary depending on the purpose of reading. Critical reading for academic purposes would
likely require students to be able to make connections between different texts and types of
knowledge. Therefore, our Critical Reading for Academic Purposes rubric also included the
following:
• Recognition of Genres (from the VALUE reading rubric)—the ability to recognize different types
of texts and how to use them;
• Connections to Discipline (from the VALUE integrative learning rubric)—the ability to draw
connections across disciplinary conventions.
These categories provide glimpses into the processes readers use to construct meaning beyond
basic comprehension by using inference, but the type of inference we were looking for here was
primarily academic. Critical reading for social engagement, on the other hand, involved issues of
agency. Here the inferences were more likely to connect to the community and personal
experience. So our Critical Reading for Social Engagement rubric included the following:

• Analysis of Knowledge (from the VALUE civic engagement rubric)—the ability to integrate
academic work and community or civic engagement;

• Connections to Experience (from the VALUE integrative learning rubric)—the ability to connect
academic knowledge and relevant life experiences.
Once the rubrics were created and the protocol designed, we met to assess interrater reliability
on our use of the rubrics. We assessed pieces of anonymous student work individually with the
rubrics and then compared our findings. In the midst of data analysis we realized that the rubrics
were not capturing everything. We chose to use supplemental analysis of the research papers
and reading logs to provide a richer description of how our students read, recognizing that all we
had were oblique measures and that we did not always agree about what those oblique measures
suggested.
We could not apply rubrics about reading if we had not read the original documents, a realization
that undermines our usual grading practices. We recognized that we habitually had been making
assumptions about how students read sources that we were unfamiliar with based on how they
integrated them into their writing.