About Peter Arthur, PhD
Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia
Scholarly Learning is a small imprint publishing research-informed books and journals for college and university students. I have spent most of my career trying to understand how students learn, and what universities can do to support them better.
I am a Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia, where my work focuses on metacognition, self-regulated learning, and helping students develop sustainable academic practices. In 2023, I received the Killam Teaching Prize, one of UBC’s highest recognitions for teaching excellence.
From 2005 to 2015, I served as the founding Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UBC Okanagan, where I worked with faculty and students across disciplines to strengthen how teaching and learning happen at a research university.
I have delivered keynotes and workshops on student success at universities across Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
Why I Created Scholarly Learning
Across two decades of teaching, I kept seeing the same pattern at every level.
Undergraduates would read a chapter three times, feel prepared, and be surprised by the exam. Graduate students would head into a term with ambitious plans for a dissertation and reach December having spent the whole term on everything except that. Different students, different stakes, the same underlying gap.
The challenge was rarely about intelligence or effort. It was the distance between intention and execution. Most students had never been taught how to work out what a task was actually asking, choose a strategy rather than defaulting to rereading, notice mid-way that an approach was not working, or recover when a week fell apart.
Then AI arrived, and the gap became easier to hide. A student can now produce competent work without doing the thinking the work was meant to develop. That is not only a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and it needs a practical answer rather than a prohibition.
These are learnable practices. They can be taught, supported, and strengthened. But many programs do not teach them explicitly, at either level.
I created Scholarly Learning to close that gap: to turn what we know from research on learning, reflection, and student success into tools students can use in their everyday academic lives. That work became the Learning Ownership System, seven moves that apply to any academic task, and the books and journals that put it in students’ hands.
What I Believe About Learning
Students do not learn only from experience. They learn by reflecting on experience.
That is why reflection is not treated here as an optional extra or a journaling exercise. It is part of how academic progress happens. When students take a few minutes to notice what worked, what got in the way, and what to adjust next time, they are running the kind of cycle that self-regulated learning research describes: plan, monitor, reflect, adjust. Research in that tradition suggests these practices help students sustain effort and choose better strategies over time.
This belief shapes both the seven-move system and the structures built around it in the journals: the daily rhythm, the weekly synthesis, and the recovery tools for when things go off track. The structure is deliberately simple, because it has to be usable on a Tuesday morning when the motivation is gone and the work feels hard. If it is not practical, it does not help.
What Informs This Work
Scholarly Learning is shaped by years of work across several areas: teaching and curriculum design in higher education; self-regulated learning and metacognition; retrieval practice and how students actually study; goal setting and implementation intentions; reflection as a foundation for learning; feedback that students do something with rather than simply receive; and the emerging and still unsettled research on what AI use does to learning.
It is also shaped by the practical problem of designing tools that a student under pressure will still open. A framework that only works for the organized student is not much use.
This is not a productivity system borrowed from business or self-help. It was built inside a university, for college and university students, by someone whose professional life is devoted to understanding how they learn. The sources are set out on the research page.
To give college and university students practical tools and reflective structures that help them own their learning, from a single assignment to a full term, and to keep their own thinking at the center of it.
Books and Journals
Think First teaches the seven moves directly, for any student in any term. The Scholar: Fall 2026, The Graduate: Fall 2026, and The Graduate: Summer 2026 apply them across distinct undergraduate and graduate terms. Six one-page tools are free, with no sign-up.
Connect
If you are a faculty member, learning center director, academic advisor, or graduate student and would like to connect about Scholarly Learning, workshops, or how to support students in owning their learning, I would welcome the conversation.