Teaching development grants final and financial report: Enhancement of teaching and learning of research skills

The project is to enhance students' abilities to conduct research for their honours project, a new element of undergraduate teaching training at IEd, and more broadly as part of the training of undergraduates in education and social sciences. Taking into account some of the issues encountered in implementing the honours project, the proposed teaching development will review strengths and weaknesses in student's research skills, catalogue resources for teaching and learning such skills and develop new ones, including highly operational items such as checklists and other tools of planning and review in the many phases of research. The project will promote use of the resources through all the undergraduate years by involving most teaching staff in the development and to recommend consistent exposure of students to a set of standards and practices. The project also enhances the learning of research skills by reviewing assessment tasks and suggesting their adjustments in all courses in programmes taught by the department to progressively build student's research abilities over the entire duration of their study at the Institute. After eight months of initial development, assessment and revision of the resources will be made in the following academic year, when the resources and recommendations will be tried out and modified.