Research-based Teaching at Universities: A Case Study of KMUTT

Traditionally, university teaching is predominantly lecture-based. An alternative approach to teaching is research-based teaching in which teachers change their roles to mentors and students change their roles to researchers. This study compares students‘ evaluations of the two approaches. The hypothesis of the study is that students taught with a research-based approach were likely to evaluate the teaching higher than those students taught with a lecture-based one. The subject population were students enrolled at King Mongkut‘s University of Technology Thonburi, which primarily focuses on science and technology. The subject samples were undergraduate students enrolled in two social studies courses, taught for three consecutive semesters. The first group (N= 1419) followed a traditional lecture-based approach and the second group (N=156) followed a research-based one. The results of the study showed that student evaluation towards the research-based approach in semester 1 and 2 of 2007 were statistically significantly higher than their counterparts. In the semester 2 of 2006, the students‘ evaluation towards the research-based approach was still higher than those of their counterparts, but not significantly. Then, the hypothesis of the study was accepted