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The aim of the Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses project was to explore ways of strengthening undergraduate teaching-learning environments in order to improve student engagement and high quality learning. The research team worked with 17 university departments across Great Britain in five contrasting subject areas: biosciences, economics, electronic engineering, history and media and cultural studies. Within the departments selected, course units at contrasting levels were identified as the focus for the study. In the first year of collaboration with the departments a detailed description of the teaching-learning environment, provided within each course unit, was constructed from documentary sources and interviews with academic staff. During that year, students completed two questionnaires, one about their general approaches to studying (LSQ) and the other about their specific approaches, their experiences of the teaching-learning environment, and what they felt they had achieved (ETLQ). Groups of students were also interviewed to provide additional data on those experiences. Analyses of these data were reported to the course team as the evidential basis for discussion of possible collaborative initiatives. In the second year of collaboration, equivalent data was collected and compared with the results from the previous year group, but with a specific focus on the experience of the collaborative initiative. From the outset of the project there was a commitment to commuication and discussion of the research approach and emerging findings with an appropriately wide range of key end-users. The project was part of the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). Further information about this project can be found on the ESRC award web page and the ETL project web page, and wider information about the research programme on the TLRP web site.

Purposive selection/case studies

Questionnaires