PBA Home > Institutional Research & Analysis > Performance Measures > QIS > 2000 > Statements > #21

CCHE Quality Indicator System (QIS)
Statements for fall 2000 submission

Indicator 21: Research, Teaching and Learning

The University of Colorado at Boulder is a research university. Among other things, this means that we are heavily engaged in both the creation of new knowledge as well as its dissemination. Contrary to popular opinion, the creation of new knowledge and new scholarship is not strictly the province of faculty. Students, including undergraduates, are heavily involved in research and creative work on campus. Indeed, one of the strongest pluses of an undergraduate education at CU-Boulder is the strong array of possibilities for students to become engaged in this endeavor.

Faculty have primary responsibility for conducting research (roughly 40% of their time is spent on research responsibilities), but students are regularly and strongly encouraged to participate; indeed, much of the day-to-day work of many projects is carried out by undergraduates. They gain enormously from their research experiences, an assertion strongly supported by students who look back on their undergraduate careers here at CU-Boulder. The campus invests heavily in providing research opportunities through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience program, the Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program, and the Boettcher Foundation Enrichment program. These are designed to supplement other faculty/student connections such as independent study, student employment in research labs or field projects, and creative scholarship activities such as those in the performing arts.

In addition to learning how research scholarship works and having the opportunity to contribute substantively to that process, students gain important connections between their academic class work and "putting that knowledge to work" in a "real" situation, supplementing classroom theory.

Undergraduate learning is also positively influenced by research activities in less direct, but very important ways. For example, faculty who are engaged in cutting-edge research must maintain their knowledge and understanding of their discipline at the most up-to-date and sophisticated level possible, which transfers to our undergraduates in many ways, including classroom material. Textbook information, as another example, builds extensively on research and new creative work. In field after field, what is being taught in the classroom (here and at other universities) can be directly linked to research on this campus by its faculty and its students.

For our undergraduate students to leave this campus and become successful in their chosen disciplines, they need to be familiar with the most up-to-date techniques, methods, and equipment available. It is the research enterprise that provides much of the impetus for this continually advancing type of teaching and learning. As but one example, because of research advances, what we now offer our students in computer science could only have been imagined just a few short years ago. Similarly, it is quite evident that what we teach today is very likely to differ dramatically from what will be taught ten years hence. The research responsibilities, discharged so effectively by CU-Boulder faculty, are directly connected to and critically supportive of the quality and timeliness of our undergraduate teaching and learning efforts.

Michael Grant, Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs for Undergraduate Education
E-mail: Michael.Grant@Colorado.EDU

QIS 2000 Index
List of Statements

L:\ir\cche\qis\00\statements\ucb21.doc, September 2000

Last revision 07/02/02