Georgia Southern University Faculty Member Honored

October 7, 2010

Trent Maurer, Ph.D., associate professor of child and family development at Georgia Southern University has been named a winner of the prestigious Regent’s Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Award (SoTL). Maurer is one of only two faculty members in the entire University System of Georgia to be honored with the award.

The awards program recognizes and rewards outstanding teaching by individual faculty members and outstanding teaching in a single academic program or department. The Teaching Excellence Awards honor exemplary teaching that significantly improves student success, while the SoTL awards recognize outstanding scholarship on teaching techniques that are shown to enhance student learning. Each year, recipients are selected from nominations submitted by the presidents of USG institutions. Each of the award winners receives $5,000 and a certificate of achievement.

Maurer’s portfolio showed how he approaches teaching and its impact on student learning using a systematic process. According to the University System of Georgia, “he raises critical questions about his pedagogical techniques, designs a way to measure the effectiveness of his new approaches to enhance learning, and uses his results to improve what he does.” Maurer has a long and consistent record of professional presentations and publications that disseminate his findings broadly so that teaching and learning well beyond Georgia Southern University can benefit from his work.

“These awards allow us to spotlight outstanding faculty and departments in the University System of Georgia who are making a tremendous difference in the lives of our students,” said Susan Herbst, executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer for the University System of Georgia.

Maurer earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Notre Dame in Psychology & History and Master of Science and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Human Development & Family Studies. He is primarily a SoTL scholar and his recent projects have included: incentive-based reading compliance, faculty-student perceptions of group work, and an evaluation of a classroom activity on social distance and discrimination. He will be presenting at the upcoming SoTL Symposium of the South on Oct. 15 in Statesboro.