The Integration of Teaching and Research in Canada: The Undergraduate Student Perspective Prepared for: The International policies and practices for academic enquiry conference, April 2007 Brad Wuetherick University of Alberta Introduction: Universities in the 21 st century have the difficult role of balancing teaching and research mandates that are increasingly in conflict. The Boyer Commission (1998) argued that research universities in the US were guilty of allowing leading researchers in the disciplines to be exempted from teaching undergraduate classes to focus on their research, inevitably resulting in undergraduate students becoming increasingly removed from the research at the fore of their disciplines (Boyer Commission, 1998). There has been a growing international consensus that an undergraduate education needs to ensure that students graduate from their undergraduate studies with higher order skills that prepare them for today’s increasingly supercomplex society and economy (Barnett, 2002). As a result, we have seen a shift (or at least an attempted shift) towards a research-based teaching and learning environment across the higher education sector around the world. Institutions are trying to increase the undergraduate exposure to research both inside and outside of the classroom through various individual, departmental or institutional initiatives (Jenkins & Healey, 2005). There has been little written in Canada, however, on the impact that this new focus within higher education has had on the quality of the undergraduate learning environment. The student perceptions of teaching and research can allow universities to evaluate its priorities for undergraduate learning and ensure that it is providing quality education alongside innovative research. The University of Alberta, a research-intensive university located in western Canada, recently created a Working Group on Teaching and Research which completed a campus-wide environmental scan, collecting data on how the various faculties were integrating research into the undergraduate student learning environment. As a follow up to this initiative, three different studies have been undertaken to explore different aspects of the relationship between research, teaching and learning from the undergraduate student perspective. The first survey used a survey instrument developed by Healey et al. in the UK (Healey et al., submitted), while the second and third surveys were completed in conjunction with the Students’ Union as part of more comprehensive surveys of the undergraduate experience on campus. This paper will explore the implications of the results of these surveys, as well as raise both implications for policy and practice as well as areas for future study. Review of Literature: There have been a number of studies that have focused on the correlation between teaching and research outcomes, most famously a meta-analysis conducted by Hattie & Marsh (1996). They concluded that there was no correlation between traditional measures of teaching and research excellence (student evaluations of teaching and number of publications). "It should cease to be surprising that the relationship between teaching and research is zero, and it would be more useful to investigate ways to increase the relationship" (Hattie & Marsh, 1996, 533). Since 1