Research and Teaching: An In-depth Study into Lecturers’ Beliefs and Experienced Challenges

Abstract

As society and higher education rapidly change, universities continue to prioritize the integration of research into teaching. This is vital to higher education and the development of students to prepare them for the future. Lecturers are crucial for the integration of research into teaching. Nonetheless, this integration has proven to be difficult for lecturers. One reason is that lecturers’ beliefs can come into play, as well as their experienced challenges originating from the environment. The present study aimed to address the gap in current research regarding possible relations between lecturers’ beliefs and challenges and how this relation might influence their ability to integrate research into teaching, which has been rarely studied before. After interviewing 18 Dutch lecturers, none of the participants explicitly emphasized a connection between beliefs and challenges. However, after interpreting the results, a high workload appeared to be one of the biggest challenges while integrating research in teaching. Furthermore, we found that lecturers’ belief regarding the importance of the integration of research into teaching may pose a challenge itself to lecturers’ abilities to do so. This study provided some recommendations as to how university policy makers could address these issues.