You change a teaching activity and notice a pattern in students' responses. Now you're wondering whether the pattern points to a research question. It's an interesting connection, but moving from classroom observation to a study needs deliberate planning.
The handbook encourages links between teaching and scholarship. Those links can be valuable when the educational purpose, research design, and responsibilities to students are kept clear.
State the research question separately from the teaching goal
A teaching goal might be helping students evaluate evidence. The research question asks something specific about the learning process, experience, or outcome. Explain what you want to understand and how the proposed evidence would address it.
Noticing that an activity seemed useful isn't the same as establishing why it helped or what would happen in another setting.
Consult the appropriate office before treating course information as research data
Explain the proposed use of student work, responses, records, or other information through your institution's process. Ask which determination, permissions, protections, and approvals apply before beginning the relevant activities.
Using your own classroom doesn't automatically make the process simpler or faster. The relationship with students creates questions worth discussing early.
Examine the instructor and researcher roles
Ask how recruitment, participation decisions, grading, and access to information should be separated or handled. Discuss what students will be told and how any concerns about influence or privacy will be addressed.
Design those arrangements with the responsible institutional experts. Don't leave them to a brief sentence added after the study is planned.
Choose evidence suited to the claim
Student feedback can describe an experience; work samples may show performance on a task. Neither automatically establishes a causal effect of your teaching change. Match the analysis and interpretation to the design.
Consider other explanations and record limitations clearly.
Explain connected contributions accurately
A project may inform teaching and produce scholarship, but describe each contribution in the appropriate reporting category and follow local guidance about overlap. Keep your role and the status of the work visible.
Keep the planning questions visible as the course changes
Teaching often requires adjustment during a term. If the proposed study involves a particular activity or assignment, ask the responsible office how instructional changes affect the research plan. Don't assume a course revision and a research amendment are the same process or that one automatically resolves the other.
Keep a clear distinction in your notes between an observation that prompted a question and evidence collected or used under an applicable research arrangement. That distinction can help you explain the project's development without treating every classroom record as available research material.
For the teaching narrative, describe the instructional decision and the evidence you're appropriately able to discuss. For the research narrative, describe the study's actual stage and your contribution. The two accounts can connect without making identical claims. A promising link between teaching and scholarship deserves enough planning that students' learning needs and the research responsibilities remain visible throughout the work.
Begin with a paragraph that separates the instructional aim, research question, proposed information, and questions for the research protection office. That gives you a more useful starting point than collecting everything now and deciding later how to use it.
Adapted from The New Faculty Handbook by Zafer Unal, pp. 79-80. See also HHS guidance on seeking institutional input before research begins.
