Do I need IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval to do SoTL work?
A. You need IRB approval whenever you are investigating human behavior, and you wish to make the results of your investigation public by publishing your results. Since most SoTL work involves focusing on students’ learning and since the goal of SoTL work is to make it public, it is highly likely that you would need IRB approval for any investigation that you conducted. If you conducted a meta-analysis (which is a process of gathering data from a set of previous investigations on a single topic and analyzing the results of all of these studies together to look for similarities and trends), you would not need IRB approval because you are not studying actual human behavior. If you did any study where you were just looking at published texts, you would not need IRB approval. But if you are looking at any work that your students are doing in your classes, you will most likely need IRB approval (if you plan to publish the results of your investigation). Each campus has their own IRB process,
Related Questions
- Our organization requires review of all research projects by our Institutional Review Board (IRB). Do we need to secure final IRB approval for the proposal process?
- Do I need Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval at time of submission of grant application?
- Do I need IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval to do SoTL work?
