Institutional Recognition of SoTL in Health Professions Education: Scoping Review for Education

A scoping review of U.S. health professions education literature maps how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is conceptualized, operationalized, and recognized in promotion and tenure. Of 4,588 records screened, 130 papers were included—52 in medical education and 78 in other HPE fields—showing inconsistent P&T recognition.

Key Takeaways

• Scoping review (doi:10.5334/pme.2740): 4,588 records → 130 included U.S. HPE papers on SoTL.
• Discipline split: 52 medical education (40%) and 78 other health professions (60%).
• SoTL is often blurred with scholarly teaching; P&T recognition remains inconsistent.
• Pharmacy P&T document analysis found SoTL among the least frequent scholarship criteria (40.5% of schools) versus publications (94.2%) and grants (86.8%).

What question did the SoTL scoping review ask?

Authors searched seven databases for peer-reviewed U.S. health professions education publications on scholarship relating to education, teaching, and/or learning, following Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review methods (doi:10.5334/pme.2740).

The goal was to map how SoTL is conceptualized, realized, and described as institutionally recognized by promotion and tenure committees—not to produce a single efficacy estimate.

What did the search yield?

Of 4,588 articles identified, 130 were included for full review. Fifty-two reported SoTL activities in medical education (40%) and 78 in other HPE domains (60%).

Articles shared core SoTL concepts—critically examining student learning, improving teaching, and disseminating insights—yet operationalized those ideas in varied ways that often blurred scholarly teaching with SoTL proper.

How inconsistently is SoTL recognized in P&T?

The review concludes SoTL has been inconsistently recognized by P&T committees. Using institutional logics analysis, recognition varied with alignment between research and teaching logics inside organizations.

Authors propose clearer distinctions among scholarly teaching, SoTL, and educational research to improve that alignment.

What do U.S. pharmacy school P&T documents show?

A qualitative analysis of U.S. pharmacy school promotion and tenure guidance found scholarship criteria commonly include publications (94.2%) and grants (86.8%), while SoTL was the least frequently included criterion at 40.5% of schools (PMC8006489).

Even when criteria were “not required,” schools still gave credit for listed scholarship evidence—signaling discretionary rather than standardized SoTL pathways.

What do pharmacy faculty surveys add?

A survey of 643 U.S. pharmacy faculty found most viewed peer-reviewed dissemination from teaching and learning work as SoTL (78–98% across activity types), 74% reported participating in SoTL, and more than 70% strongly agreed SoTL should count in promotion and tenure (ScienceDirect abstract).

Reported barriers included competing time commitments, funding gaps, and limited institutional recognition—consistent with the scoping review’s institutional-logics framing.

What remains unproven?

Neither the scoping review nor the pharmacy document analysis proves that any single P&T template raises educational outcomes. Causal claims that SoTL recognition improves patient-care training quality need dedicated evaluation designs beyond these mapping studies.

Readers should not treat “130 papers” as a census of all global SoTL; the corpus is U.S.-focused peer-reviewed literature meeting the review’s inclusion rules.

Why institutional recognition of SoTL is a talent and quality issue

Health professions schools that ask faculty to innovate in teaching while rewarding only discovery science create a predictable talent squeeze. The scoping review’s institutional-logics frame explains why SoTL stalls: teaching and research logics compete inside the same P&T committee.

Clarifying definitions helps. Scholarly teaching improves one’s own classroom with evidence but may not disseminate. SoTL adds public, peer-critiqued contribution. Educational research may pursue generalizable theory beyond a single course. Collapsing those categories makes dossier review arbitrary.

Pharmacy-school document evidence showing SoTL in only about two in five P&T guides, despite high faculty support for counting SoTL, illustrates the gap between rhetoric and written criteria. Closing that gap is a governance task: update handbooks, train reviewers, and publish example dossiers.

For academic medical centers partnering with industry on educational grants, misaligned P&T rules can quietly kill SoTL projects when junior faculty are told to prioritize NIH-style discovery metrics instead.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How many papers did the SoTL scoping review include?

After screening 4,588 records, the authors included 130 U.S. health professions education papers for full review.

Is SoTL consistently credited in promotion and tenure?

No. The scoping review found inconsistent P&T recognition, and a pharmacy-school document study found SoTL listed in only 40.5% of P&T guidance documents.

How is SoTL defined in this literature?

SoTL is generally the practice of critically examining student learning to improve teaching and disseminating those insights so others can build on them, distinct from undocumented scholarly teaching.

Primary Sources

1. Perspectives on Medical Education scoping review (doi)
2. PMC: pharmacy P&T scholarship criteria analysis
3. ScienceDirect: pharmacy faculty SoTL survey
4. PubMed index for HPE scholarship literature