Research Informed Teaching is becoming increasingly popular and ‘fashionable’ these days given the rise of a number of pedagogical methods and techniques within the higher education sector. An exploratory sequential mixed-methods design was used to capture academics’ feedback and assess the effectiveness and value of Research Informed Teaching for both students and teachers.
The first phase comprised detailed face-to-face interviews of academic staff across all faculties across the University. The qualitative data thus gathered was analysed and used to draw up a set of questions for designing and imparting a questionnaire-based semi-structured survey. The survey was administered online across the university and responses were analysed.
Finally inferences were drawn by mixing data from both phases. Study findings revealed how lecturers implemented RIT into their own teaching provision and how it was highly idiosyncratic; determined by their individual teaching subjects their own teaching styles and their own independent definitions of RIT.