Engaging students in aspects of research, for their assessment, can increase their motivation, develop skills and make them more critical workers with academic literature in future. It requires a high level of analytical thought, but also the capacity to operationalise conceptual or theoretical knowledge.
Research has traditionally come at the conclusion of a programme (often as a dissertation) but students can learn from research at all levels. ‘Enquiry-Based Learning’, a useful term for this approach, moves students beyond comprehension (“what is the existing answer to this question?”) to knowledge creation (“how can I answer my question?") (Levy, 2010).
Depending on the task(s), research activity can require students to: review relevant literature; develop a research question; evaluate research tools and employ them; reflect on research ethics; analyse data; communicate the process (including findings and limitations).
Assessing more than one of these tasks, in a sequence, can help students to plan, allow teachers to check their understanding and progress, and deter academic misconduct by demonstrating authorship. (These tasks can also be used as standalone assessments; see Working with pre-existing sources.)
Research-related assessments can support students' later work on a dissertation, relating to skills and/or content.
- Learning through research can lead to more engaged, critical and informed students than teaching by more didactic methods.
- Students can understand their other courses more fully, and the 'nuts and bolts' of their discipline.
- Becoming 'expert' in an area can increase students' sense of autonomy in their learning and develop their confidence in articulating original arguments.
- Developing a wider variety of types of writing and communication is useful for students' longer-term employability skills.
- As a research proposal can be relatively short, it is ideal to be presented in a different format (such as a poster or an oral presentation) and combined with peer feedback.
- Research works well as a group activity (but the output could be an individual piece).
- Any unfamiliar assessment can be stressful for students, and impact attainment. You can help through several approaches: introducing teaching activities which use similar skills; sharing examples of the outputs (at different levels of achievement, and with some commentary on their strengths and weaknesses); writing clear criteria and discussing/using them with students.
- Research can be unpredictable, and thus not allow students to equally demonstrate their abilities.
Clear criteria help students to understand what is expected, and markers to align. Criteria should be based on the learning outcomes, explain what is expected, show what this looks like at different levels of attainment, and indicate how marks will be allocated. Criteria should be shared and discussed with students (preferably through an associated activity).
As projects will be varied, students may make more use of office hours or other one-to-one guidance from tutors.
Students from educational backgrounds which do not prioritise 'original argument' may particularly struggle to understand what is required of them in an open-ended and personalised project.
Putting students in contact with their relevant library liaison is another form of support for when they are locating material.
Generative AI could be used to create parts of this assessment output. Ensure students are aware of when Generative AI is permitted and useful, and when it cannot be used. You could help to ensure students are meeting the learning outcomes by: carrying out some work towards the assessment during contact time, with peer and academic discussion; including a question and answer session in an activity. Requiring students to submit early stages of the project – for example, an area of interest, or a draft research question – and discussing with the student will require them to demonstrate authorship (and also allow tutors to intervene in projects which appear off-topic).
LSE100 research projects, a student-facing description
Levy, P., Little, S., McKinney, P., Nibbs, A. and Wood, J. (2010) The Sheffield companion to inquiry-based learning. CILASS: The Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences , Sheffield. Available at: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/192004/1/Sheffield_IBL_Companion.pdf (Accessed: August 2025)