You might add a research component to you class because it may be a more enjoyable and familiar form of teaching for research faculty, as well as a positive alternative to the traditional lecture method. Also, if you are already focusing on formal inquiry or methodology, you may want to incorporate a research component into your course in order to expand on what you are already teaching. If you are interested in developing a course to meet the Experiential Education (EE) requirement in the General Education curriculum, courses with research components can qualify.

• …it makes for a better course. Because I’m convinced that the students like to do a research project…you want students to really be engaging with the world. And the can do so with research as a complement to what they’re learning in class. And there’s really not a substitute for that.
  
  -- Faculty member

Undergraduate students who enrolled in UNC-CH courses with research components cited numerous benefits of the research component including the opportunity for hands-on learning, exposure to valuable library and web resources, increased knowledge in statistical methods, and greater confidence in conducting primary research:

• …I feel like I have a lot more power over the research. It’s not like I have to go seek all this information out and maybe I’ll find it, maybe I won’t. I feel a lot more confident that I know how to do it and that it’s not a big scary thing. I feel much more in control of doing it.
  
  -- Undergraduate student
• I definitely think this [research project] is valuable because I haven’t had any other classes where we’ve had to use SPSS or any of those programs so I’ve done research projects but never with statistical analysis. And so it was very beneficial in that I learned how to use data sets and things like that for research. At first I didn’t want to do it going into it, but after I came out of it I was like wow, I understand things a lot.
  
  -- Undergraduate student