Assessment Exercise

The contemporary relationship between research and teaching in higher education is a complex and contested one. In the UK context, for example, academics and university managers are currently confronting the quality assurance requirements of the forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The 2008 RAE will be the sixth in a series of exercises conducted nationally to assess the quality of UK research, and, inevitably, to inform the selective disbursement of public funds for research by the respective higher education funding bodies. The implicit bias towards subject-specific research, however, raises a number of questions for the educational researcher in the broad field of the built environment. This paper critically reviews the contemporary literature concerning the search for quality, and the teaching-research relationship, and reflects on the perceptions of, and barriers to, a more constructive relationship between teaching and research. The paper contends that contemporary political, practice-related, and academic debates around for example the knowledge society, Information and Communication Technologies, and the skills agenda, highlight the pivotal role of educational research in this changing landscape. It concludes by raising some questions for the UK RAE 2008 exercise