How did you become interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?

A lunchtime seminar series in graduate school was dedicated to physics education research and presented research that showed that despite the field being at the forefront of science education research, physics teaching is routinely rated lowest of all disciplines in university. Seeing the innovation and effort stemming from physics education research, I've always been interested in exploring both how to improve physics education and how to disseminate such innovations.

What keeps you engaged or motivates you in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning?

SoTL has tremendous relative potential for making real societal advances compared with most other scholastic endeavours. Education intersects with an incredibly broad swath of the population!

What projects are you currently working on or hope to work on in the near future?

I am working on exploring/developing new assessment methods and structures for university-level science teaching. I believe that classroom assessment is woefully understudied aspect of education research despite being more consequential than, say, content delivery or teaching “style”. Students can overcome poor instruction but might not overcome poor assessment.

SoTL publications or presentations:

Slepkov, A. D., Van Bussel, M. L., Fitze, K. M., & Burr, W. S. (2021). A baseline for multiple-choice testing in the university classroom. SAGE Open, 11(2), Article 21582440211016838. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211016838   

Shiell, R., & Slepkov, A.D. (2018). A Manual for Authors of Integrated Testlets. Trent University. 

Slepkov, A. D. (2013). Integrated testlets and the immediate feedback assessment technique. American Journal of Physics, 81(10), 782–791. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4820241   

Slepkov, A. D., & Godfrey, A. T. K. (2019). Partial credit in answer-until-correct multiple-choice tests deployed in a classroom setting. Applied Measurement in Education, 32(2), 138–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/08957347.2019.1577249  

Slepkov, A. D., & Shiell, R. C. (2014). Comparison of integrated testlet and constructed-response question formats. Physical Review Special Topics. Physics Education Research, 10(2), Article 020120. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.10.020120  

 Slepkov, A. D., Vreugdenhil, A. J., & Shiell, R. C. (2016). Score increase and partial-credit validity when administering multiple-choice tests using an answer-until-correct format. Journal of Chemical Education, 93(11), 1839–1846. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00028  

Shiell, R., & Slepkov, A. (2015). Integrated testlets: A new form of expert-student collaborative testing. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 8, 201–210. https://doi.org/10.22329/celt.v8i0.4244  

Slepkov, A. D., Ironside, K. B., & DiBattista, D. (2015). Benford’s Law: Textbook exercises and multiple-choice testbanks. PloS One, 10(2), Article e0117972. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0117972   

Rayf C. Shiell, Aaron D. Slepkov Integrated testlets in optics and photonics: a novel assessment tool and its online deployment. Proc. SPIE 12297, Sixteenth Conference on Education and Training in Optics and Photonics: ETOP 2021, 122971X (30 Jun 2022); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2635570 

SoTL interests:

• Quantitative methods
• Mixed methods
• Assessment
• Multiple Choice Testing