One of the University's most effective and dynamic teachers, he has developed an exceptionally wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses in Russian and other Slavic languages, in linguistics and in English. He is also admired for his unrivaled advisement/mentoring skills and his availability to students. Even alumni continue to seek his counseling as they move forward in their educational and career pursuits.

An internationally acclaimed scholar in the Bulgarian language and in Slavic linguistics, he has utilized a spectrum of diverse methodologies and materials to enliven such potentially dry material as beginning linguistics.

Scatton has been involved in many initiatives in undergraduate education at Albany, including "Writing Across the Curriculum," and he helped develop a SUNY-wide initiative in "languages across the curriculum." He was the founder of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Computing Laboratory and also served as its director. He was a one of six faculty members who helped pioneer the Project Renaissance experimental program at Albany that partly uses student residential space to teach students, and is carried out in a computer-intensive environment.

Scatton has in fact since the early 1980s given presentations on computer-assisted instruction in Russian throughout the Northeast at universities and in high schools. He has published widely on the Bulgarian language and linguistics — including the definitive Reference Grammar of Modern Bulgarian — and on Russian, Old Church Slavic and Balkan and Proto-Slavic languages as well. The recipient of two Fulbright scholar awards, he was presented with an honorary doctoral degree by Bulgaria's Sofia University in 1996.