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

I became interested in SoTL after several years of being a professor at Trent University. I started to wonder why faculty, who are so interested in research and its value, do not always seem to apply that same curiosity and interest in their pedagogy. In other words, for many of us, the two domains of teaching and research seemed to operate in silos. I wanted to start to bridge those two domains in my own practice.

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

I'm always interested in talking to other instructors about their pedagogy and why they do the things they do in their courses. I find that I always learn a little bit from these conversations. Knowing that there is a community of like-minded instructors with an interest in SoTL is reassuring and keeps me motivated.

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

I am currently a Teaching Fellow at Trent (SoTL Stream). My project involves investigating how statistics instructors in undergraduate psychology courses think and teach about effect sizes in their courses. Effect sizes tell us about the magnitude of a result (e.g., the size of the difference between two groups or the strength of a correlation between two variables). For decades, our discipline has been recommending that researchers report effect sizes along with other, more traditional, statistical results (i.e., p-values). However, researchers have been slow to report and interpret effect sizes in their work. Although many instructors teach about effect sizes in their courses, not all do to the same extent. In addition, it is challenging to teach students how to meaningfully interpret effect sizes, so I am curious how other instructors approach this topic.

SoTL publications or presentations:

Peters, K.R. & O’Hagan (2025). Teaching undergraduate students to meaningfully interpret effect sizes. Collaborative Idea Session presented at the Research on Statistics Education (RoSE) eConference held virtually on July 31, 2025. 

Peters, K.R. & O’Hagan, F. (2025). Beyond black and white thinking: Leveraging epistemic cognition to transform statistics teaching in psychology. Oral presentation at the annual conference of the Canadian Psychological Association held in St. John’s, NF, June 12-14, 2025. 

Unelli, A.*, O’Hagan, F., & Peters, K.R. (2024). Navigating complexity: Instructor perspectives on teaching about effect sizes in psychology. Poster presentation presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Psychological Association held in Ottawa, ON, June 21-23, 2024.

SoTL interests:

• Qualitative methods
• Quantitative methods
• Mixed methods
• Student engagement
• Course or curriculum revision