Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Abstract Research-based teaching offers valuable learning opportunities by involving students in research and inquiry. However, employing these approaches within standardised university assessment frameworks may create tensions. Drawing on ethnographic research from a university-wide initiative to integrate research in teaching, this article examines how assessment practices interact with pedagogies of research-based teaching. Our analysis shows that academics and students experience a discrepancy between how students engage in processes of research and when focusing on the final assessment. Drawing on the sociology of regimes of engagement, we analyse these experiences as reflecting tensions between different ways of engaging and the various benefits or goods they involve. We show how a tension between an explorative engagement (oriented towards discovery) and an engagement in plan (focused on predefined outcomes) predominates these experiences and practices of research-based teaching. Our analysis highlights how teachers sustain an explorative engagement within plural regimes through a delicate art of composition, creating protected spaces for exploration or modifying assessment formats to accommodate the research processes. Through this analysis, we show that research-based teaching is often guided by an emphasis on open inquiry. We argue that challenges of evaluation extend beyond aligning assessment with student activities, but reflect a more profound predicament concerning the coexistence in modern universities of environments that dispose different ways of engaging, each with distinct goods and losses for individuals. We contend that strengthening the integration of research and teaching in higher education requires recognising the tensions between plural engagement regimes and their implications for teaching and assessment.