Teaching as Research (TAR)
The improvement of teaching and learning is a dynamic and ongoing process, just as is research in any discipline. At the core of improving teaching and learning is the need to accurately determine what students have learned as a result of teaching practices. This is a research problem, to which instructors can effectively apply their research skills and ways of knowing. In so doing, instructors themselves become the agents for change in teaching and learning.
Teaching-as-Research involves the deliberate, systematic, and reflective use of research methods to develop and implement teaching practices that advance the learning experiences and outcomes of students and teachers. The process of completing a TAR project includes identifying a research question and designing an intervention to assess the effectiveness of your teaching. However, a TAR project is not necessarily a Discipline Based Research Project, in the sense that it is meant to be a relatively small intervention, and not a publishable research study (although some TAR students design projects with the intent to publish). The goal is to learn how to become a reflective teacher so that wherever you end up working, you will be able to apply these methods to assess your own teaching.
For examples of TAR projects, visit our TAR Scholars page.
