Introduction
The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) is committed to conducting and disseminating pedagogical research as a central part of our mission. In order to accomplish this aim, we developed a project to explore pedagogical research published by Rice community members. This project was funded by the Fondren Fellows program and involved a collaboration between Fondren Fellow Lucy Hu and CTE Associate Director Catherine Barber.
The project involved designing and implementing search and cross-referencing strategies to discover Rice pedagogical research, disseminate this research, and analyze key features of the research. The study was conducted in Fall of 2024, with findings shared in Spring of 2025.
Research Questions
- How has engagement with pedagogical research evolved among Rice researchers?
- What are some of the predominant themes in this research?
Methods
A structured approach was employed to collect, classify, and analyze pedagogical research, involving the following key steps:
- Database Identification & Search Strategy Development
- The Web of Science database was used as the primary source for retrieving pedagogical articles.
- Initial search categories included Education, Educational Research, and Education Scientific Discipline, with results limited to Rice University-affiliated publications, yielding 297 items.
- Data Organization & Classification
- A comprehensive collection of pedagogical articles authored by Rice-affiliated researchers was compiled.
- The Web of Science items were manually reviewed to verify their relevance to pedagogical research, confirm current or former Rice-affiliated authors, and limit to journal articles as the publication type. Of note, proceedings abstracts that were published in scholarly journals were included whenever possible.
- Additional articles were identified through direct solicitation of Umbrella IRB researchers in Fall of 2024.
- Additional features, including author departments, article discipline, and research type, were added to finalize the collection.
- Only publications from 2000 to 2024 were selected for inclusion, resulting in 78 publications for the analysis.
- Data Analysis & Trend Identification
- Counts and yearly trends were analyzed for scholarly discipline, author Department and School, journal, and article methodology to identify patterns in pedagogical research.
- Graphs were generated to visualize publication trends over time, highlighting variations in research engagement across disciplines and departments.
- The analysis provided insights into which disciplines and departments have contributed most to pedagogical research and how engagement has changed over time.
Results
Our analysis of 78 peer-reviewed pedagogical research publications from 2000 to 2024 suggests a growing interest in publishing pedagogical research at Rice (Figure 1). Of particular note is the increase in publications since the introduction of the CTE's Umbrella IRB protocol in 2017-2018.
The majority of study methodologies were evenly split between qualitative and quantitative approaches, followed by mixed methods approaches and a small number of theory-focused papers (Figure 2).
Several recurring themes emerged. In addition to numerous articles on discipline-specific courses, content, and instructional practices, the most common cross-disciplinary themes included active learning, the use of technology, communication, teamwork, and measurement/assessment.
Furthermore, results indicated a growing engagement across various disciplines, with the largest number of publications about chemistry and teaching in the professional disciplines (e.g., business and medical education), followed by publications about biology and interdisciplinary STEM collaborations (Figure 3). Note that "discipline" represents the scholarly discipline associated with the content of the article, rather than the specific department(s) associated with each author. These results have been grouped by field (natural sciences, interdisciplinary, engineering and computing, social sciences, and humanities).
In addition, an exploration of authors' specific departments revealed that faculty in over 15 departments had publications in this collection, pointing to the broad scope of faculty involvement in pedagogical research. Additional analyses, including numbers of department-level publications, can be found in the PSP presentation on this project.
Summary
Pedagogical research has become increasingly prevalent at Rice during the past 25 years, with faculty and others publishing rigorous scholarship on innovations in teaching and learning, including at least 78 journal articles as of December, 2024. The umbrella IRB protocol has supported Rice pedagogical projects, which embrace a wide variety of methods, topics, and disciplines.
This work represents a snapshot of the larger landscape of Rice educational publications. We will update the pedagogical research collection annually, so if you notice that your work has been omitted from this collection and would like for it to be included, please submit your work's DOI to our database by updating your profile!