Research-informed teaching means the university’s research mission infuses into its educational program. This can be as simple as faculty leading with questions and modeling expert thought by “thinking aloud” when encountering problems. It can be as significant as partnering with students to create new knowledge.
A crucial second meaning of research-informed teaching is that it’s evidence-based or informed by what we know about how students learn: actively, in contexts of high challenge and support, through collaborative work across differences of identity and viewpoint in response to frequent feedback, and with deliberate reflection on and integration of ideas across contexts.
Research-Informed Teaching:
- Instruction models a process or culture of inquiry characteristic of disciplinary or professional expertise.
- Evaluation of student performance linked to explicit goals for student learning established by faculty member, unit, and, for core education, university; these goals and criteria for meeting them are made clear to students.
- Timely, useful feedback on activities and assignments, including indicating students' progress in course.
- Instruction engages, challenges, and supports students.
For example, to invite students into the university’s research mission, UO instructors might:
- Recognize when the learning environment needs to be adjusted to foster deep learning based on their expert judgment and experience.
- Lead with questions and model expert thought by “thinking aloud” when encountering problems. [5]
- Provide students with course-based research experiences or other projects that engage students directly in the scholarly methods of the discipline.
- Adjust course material to reflect current debates, topics, and trends in the discipline.
- Partner with students to create new knowledge.
For example, to act on research on student learning, UO instructors might:
- Communicate compelling goals for student learning and design courses tightly aligned with those goals (backward design). [17] [18]
- Clearly convey the purpose, process for completion, and criteria for evaluation of class assignments before students begin work (transparency). [19]
- Build occasions for student reflection about their own learning processes, challenges, and growth (metacognition). [6] [20] [21]
- Use students’ time in and out of class strategically and actively by, for example:
- assigning preparatory work beyond reading-only assignments to get more out of students’ class time; [22]
- encouraging students to make connections between the preparatory work and the following class or online activities; [14]
- using students’ class time to harness the power and energy of the peer community to share ideas, demonstrations, real-time experiences, new scenarios, problems, artifacts, and complications that capture students’ knowledge and skills; [23] [24] [25]
- providing students with after-class opportunities for reinforcement and reflection; [20] [26]
- breaking up didactic lectures into smaller 10-15-minute segments with opportunities for active student engagement, processing, questioning and knowledge integration. [14]
- Provide students simple, helpful [27] [28] feedback on low-stakes practice which could include the use of rubrics [14], student peer review [29], instructor “think alouds” [5] or other time saving techniques.