Mapping research across the undergraduate curriculum in UCC

UCC identifies itself as a research-led University and has stated the ambition to strengthen the integration of research, teaching and learning by maximising opportunities for students to participate in research programmes throughout their undergraduate studies. The number of undergraduate programmes with student-involved research from first year onwards is an important measure of this ambition. A curriculum analytics project was enacted by CIRTL staff and Academic Systems Administration to gather evidence of research-oriented and research-based teaching in undergraduate programmes offered to students via the CAO system in 2015/2016. The review showed that 55% of undergraduate programmes make explicit mention of research and inquiry in their programme learning outcomes. Analysis of module learning outcomes further showed that 45% of the reviewed programmes provide students with exposure to research-based or research-oriented teaching across the duration of their programme. The project provides an important baseline of existing research in the undergraduate curriculum, it uncovers exemplar activities across a range of subject areas and disciplines, and extends the vocabulary around research and inquiry to include discipline-specific approaches and understandings. Future work will include gathering feedback from staff and qualitative research with students to correct any inaccuracies in the data with a view to refining the search query and running a regular, more automated analysis.