Microsoft Word - JETHE Editor Letter - December 2020.docx


 
 

Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 3, no. 2 

 
Dear Contributors, Reviewers, and Readers: 
 
We are incredibly grateful for the work of our contributors and reviewers 
during an uncertain and difficult time for higher education around the world. 
The effects of COVID-19 have touched nearly all aspects of life, including the 
review and publication process for scholarly journals. We want to reaffirm 
our hope that during these times you have been able to stay safe and 
healthy as you support your students, colleagues, communities, and 
families.  
 
We want to thank our reviewers and authors who overcame the obstacles 
presented to us in 2020 and helped us to produce a fall issue of the Journal 
of Effective Teaching in Higher Education (JETHE). Although originally 
intended to be published in November 2020, the current issue was slightly 
delayed and published in mid-December 2020. Although the global pandemic 
slowed us down, it did not prevent us from curating the five pieces included 
in JETHE volume 3, issue 2.  
 
The current issue demonstrates our continued commitment to high quality, 
data driven scholarship as well as the diverse range of topics on the 
scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) that we publish in JETHE. Each 
article represents a distinct perspective on teaching and learning in higher 
education today. One article in this issue explores perceptions of culturally 
responsive teaching practices at a minority-serving institution. A second 
article examines curricular alignment with student learning outcomes in a 
teacher education program. Another contribution discusses transformative 
pedagogical practices that can be utilized to develop student voice in writing 
assignments, while a fourth article engages in an exploratory study of 
teaching personas. The fifth article included in the current issue analyzed 
student survey responses to examine skills developed in a Biology course. As 
always, all articles include implications for the practice of teaching across 
disciplines—an important contribution that is emphasized in JETHE. 
 
We also want to give a special thanks to everyone who contributed feedback 
about the journal during an applied learning assessment project conducted 
this fall semester. We received over 70 responses to the survey we shared in 
October, which is approximately 20% of all registered users of the journal. 
Your responses have provided us with meaningful feedback that will help us 
to strengthen the journal in the future. Thank you! 
 



Letter from the Editors ii 
 

Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 3, no. 1 

Additionally, we want to highlight the continued demand for access to 
articles published in JETHE: as of December 2020, readers have completed 
nearly 5000 full-text downloads of articles published in our first three issues. 
On average, articles have been downloaded approximately 200 times/each. 
Beyond downloads, we are also seeing an increase in the citation of JETHE 
articles by other authors; notably, one article from our first issue boasts 15 
additional cites with most cited by 1-2 other authors. Your help and support 
have been invaluable as we continue to develop the journal, and we hope to 
continue to engage an international audience with current issues in teaching 
and learning in higher education. 
 
We invite you to engage with the pieces in our December 2020 issue and 
consider making your own contributions to this work. We also invite you to 
become a reviewer for JETHE. If you are interested in reviewing for our 
journal, please send an email to the editors at jethe@uncw.edu indicating 
the subjects related to SoTL in higher education that most interest you and 
about which you have expertise. Please also attach your CV to that email. 
 
Our next issue will be published in April 2021, and we look forward to 
working with some of you as authors and reviewers in production of that and 
future issues of JETHE. To submit an article or download full-text copies of 
current and past issues please visit http://jethe.org.  
 
James DeVita and Colleen Reilly 
Coeditors, JETHE