INTRODUCTION 7

students and both lines of research continue to ground scholarly work on teaching and learning in psychology. (Huber & Morreale, 2002, p. 13) Despite what we have said about the typical psychology graduate student's marginal preparation for teaching, there is a surprisingly long history of interest among some psychologists in promoting excellence in the teaching of psychology. For example, the 1899 convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) included a session on the teaching of psychology, and the second of APA's specialinterest divisions, formed in 1945, was the division on the Teaching of Psychology (Nummedal et al., 2002). It is now known as the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP). In 1990, the APA created its education directorate with the charge to encourage research on the teaching of psychology across all subfields. In the late 1990s, the STP Task Force on Defining Scholarship in Psychology established evaluative criteria for the scholarship of teaching. They included a high level of disciplinary expertise, innovation, replication by others, documentation and exposure to peer review, and significant or impactful content (Nummedal et al., 2002).

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

The result of all this activity in psychology, education, and related disciplines has been the development of a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), an applied research enterprise with the central aim of improving the quality of teaching and learning in college classrooms and departments and disseminating it beyond these settings (DeAngelis, 2003; McKinney, 2003). Through SoTL research, instructors are encouraged to be more critical examiners of their own teaching and to share their findings with other instructors in their discipline and across disciplines. They are also encouraged to see their teaching activities as potentially valuable sources of scholarship. This scholarship can take many forms, ranging from simple critical observation of classroom patterns, to use of classroom data to try out new classroom interventions, to research that compares testing methods to see which best fosters learning.... The basic notion is that the teaching and learning in one's own discipline or profession is itself a kind of living laboratory, a setting in which all sorts of intriguing, researchable questions quite specific to the discipline or profession develop. Since those of us in academia are engaged in teaching, evaluation and course design all the