When Morgan Chapman and I read a research paper about poor/ineffective teaching behaviours (find the original paper here), we wondered whether results would be similar with our students in Canada (because the original study used American university students as their participants). So, we wanted to re-do their study in our context. Another paper also inspired us to ask faculty about their perceptions because we thought it was important to understand whether both groups agreed on what “bad” teaching looked like. We also learned about a newer paper that compared American data to responses collected in China, so we also wanted to look at results cross-culturally in a 3-way table: Canada, USA, China. To this end, we decided to replicate (re-do what they did) and extend (to Canadian college students) the original research. When the CTL call for SoTL proposals came out, we applied for funding so that we could have a draw for participants in the hopes that this incentive would encourage student participation in our study (though we could have collected data without offering an incentive). We received the funds from CTL, and then applied to the REB using the full application form and including all required appendices (see details about each section of the form from my previous posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The advantage of a replication is that we didn’t have to develop our survey (we used the original researcher’s survey, with only minor tweaks in wording to make it fit with our college context). Once the REB approved our application, we collected data across multiple semesters, analysed the data, and wrote up the article. We presented it at the Fall PD Day in October 2022 (which is the final deliverable related to the CTL SoTL funding) and we plan to present it this summer at the Education and Cognition conference at McMaster. We also wrote it up as an article and it is currently under review for publication in a scholarly journal.
I that hope reading about this example inspires you to think about the possibility of a replication and extension study the next time you’re reading something scholarly!
If there is anything I can do to support your research or if you have suggestions for me in my role as Research Coordinator, please reach out via email or pop in to my virtual “office hours” on Fridays from 12:30-1:30pm in my Whereby room.
