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  6. Guidance in presentation for Quality Monitoring and Enhancement

Guidance in presentation for Quality Monitoring and Enhancement

This guidance applies to modules in which students carry out research tasks or projects involving human participants, human data or human biological samples as part of the taught curriculum.

Module teams are required to have an research ethics framework in place for dissertation modules and taught undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum where a research task involves human participants as part of course work or assessment.

Research ethics frameworks for taught courses contribute to academic standards because a significant part of their function is to ensure that students learn about responsible research. Capturing student learning about the value and conduct of ethical research needs to be included in activities and assessments. 

Governance oversight for research in the taught curriculum is held by Faculty Academic Committees - Learning, Teaching and Assessment (FAC-LTA). FAC-LTAs approved plans for research ethics frameworks in each Faculty in November 2023 and are now in an implementation phase.

To embed the requirement for research ethics frameworks a prompt has been included as part of the University’s quality monitoring and enhancement (QME) process. This is intended to support module teams to reflect on research ethics as an aspect of academic quality and Boards of Studies to ensure that research ethics is effectively embedded in student learning on modules. This includes both training students for ethical research practice as well as ethics review of research conducted by students with human participants, as the former will prepare students for the latter. This enables FAC-LTA to receive assurance that research ethics is being managed appropriately in the relevant courses.

The Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) (which reports to Research Committee) has set up an undergraduate/postgraduate taught curriculum (UGPGT) liaison group which is advisory to Faculties. The liaison group does not have an oversight function but will provide templates and guidance documentation for module teams looking to develop processes for ethics oversight of student research projects on taught modules. Examples of good practice in supporting ethical research with human participants will also be collated to inform module and qualification teams in production. 

The HREC UGPGT liaison group is composed of the following Faculty representatives:

Faculty Representative
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Claire Hewson
Faculty of Business and Law Maureen Rhoden
Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Payam Rezaie
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies Alison Fox

Your role in reviewing research ethics through Quality Monitoring Enhancement

As part of the Quality Monitoring and Enhancement (QME) process (more information about which can be found on the Quality and Monitoring Enhancement SharePoint site (internal link only), module teams are asked to reflect on evidence related to student learning about, and application of research ethics as part of the taught curriculum within their modules.

Teams should consider…

  • Where research ethics training is incorporated in a module.
  • Whether/how learning about research ethics is consolidated and assessed.
  • How student learning about research ethics is supported, and those supporting student learning are supported.
  • How student research is assured as ethically planned and conducted.

Questions for QME

As part of QME, for those modules in which students carry out research tasks/projects, teams could consider the following questions. These are designed to capture evidence about academic quality related to ethical research by students on your module. For each of these questions it would be helpful to consider what has gone well, any barriers or issues that were encountered, whether any changes are planned and what the timescale for these are. Suggested forms of evidence are offered for each question.

Evidence could include confirmation that students have carried out an appraisal to support ethical research e.g. ethical appraisal forms submitted with TMA/EMAs or logged by tutors/module teams.

Evidence could include whether there were any high-risk proposals identified and mitigated against e.g. by changing plans or choosing another topic, focus or task. Additionally, you could consider evidence of any issues logged which have arisen during the conduct of student research and how these were managed.

Evidence can include examples of tutor training, tutor guidance handbooks and/or the presence of Faculty-level ethics leads or Ethical Oversight Groups.