i teach

Washington University faculty often find a productive interplay between their teaching and research. Their experiences accord well with the findings of two studies (reviewed below). These studies, one focused on a survey of economics faculty and the other focused on graduate students in the sciences, suggest that teaching can contribute to the development of innovative research ideas and to the improvement of research skills. The following examples from Washington University faculty reveal that teaching has enhanced their research in multiple, and sometimes unexpected, ways.

Deanna Barch (Psychology), whose research focuses on the interactions among cognition, emotion, and brain function, notes that teaching has “helped me to learn how to explain the nature of the research, what we hope to learn, and how we would like our students to interact with our research participants.” In addition, the process of preparing to teach “has often led me to learn about new avenues of research that I have used to inform the development of new research projects—including current research examining the neural developmental changes that contribute to the development of depression.”

Bill Buhro (Chemistry) provides a specific example of the latter phenomenon, noting that on one occasion while teaching General Chemistry, it occurred to him that “the ‘particle-in-a-box’ model that faculty use to introduce General Chemistry students to the properties of atoms and the basic concepts of quantum mechanics” could be applied to the subject of his research: semiconductor nanocrystals. Buhro’s research group then “spent the next several years publishing a series of papers that confirmed this teaching-inspired insight”: particle-in-a-box analyses could provide a “good first-order picture for the nanocrystal-shape dependences of quantum confinement” (read Buhro’s full comments here).

Peter Kastor (History and American Culture Studies) notes that the topic of his second book, William Clark's World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns, was shaped by the questions that students asked and investigated in American Culture Studies 101: Lewis and Clark and the American Challenge. “As the students engaged the question of how Lewis and Clark described their experience,” he explains, “I began to ask how Americans in general struggled to represent a broader North American West.” Teaching multidisciplinary courses in American Culture studies, he adds, “has forced me to read outside my comfort zone, with my own scholarship benefiting as a result” (read Kastor’s full comments here).

Survey of Economics Faculty

A survey of economics faculty at several research universities suggests that the experiences of these Washington University faculty are widely shared. After experiencing first-hand the positive influence of teaching on research, economists William Becker and Peter Kennedy decided to survey colleagues to see if their experiences resonated with others. Becker and Kennedy sent the following question to 150 economists who were productive and accomplished researchers at several universities: “Can you think of an instance in which your teaching enhanced your research?”

They summarized the results in a paper, “Does Teaching Enhance Research in Economics?” for a session on research and teaching at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. The answers to this question, provided by the 65 economists who responded, allowed Becker and Kennedy to make the following observations about the relationship between teaching and research:

• Teaching enhances research more than the existing literature suggests. Prior to the survey, the most thorough literature review on the topic reported no relationship between teaching and research, concluding that “the common belief that research and teaching are inextricably entwined is an enduring myth” (Hattie and Marsh, 1996). The personal experiences of the faculty Becker and Kennedy surveyed suggest that this “myth” is very much a reality for many.
• A large fraction of active researchers recognize that teaching enhances their research. Fifty percent of the survey respondents gave specific examples of instances in which their teaching led to a research publication. An additional thirty-five percent of respondents did not give a specific example, but nonetheless reported that teaching has played a positive role in their research activities.
• Teaching enhances research through a wide variety of channels. Below, we have summarized two of the major themes in the respondents’ accounts of how teaching enhanced their research.

Research Enhanced Through the Act of Teaching

Many of the respondents reinforced the idea that the practice of classroom teaching honed their understanding of their discipline in ways that they perceived to improve their research. For example, some faculty found that teaching the same course several times helped them to clarify their thinking about the topics that were the focus of their research. The process of preparing for class and thinking about how to present material clearly to students also provided insights for some faculty. Even more, those moments in the classroom when the respondents found themselves unable to clearly explain something, or to justify their own analyses, led them to significantly revise their thinking on a specific issue that was relevant to their research. Teaching and preparing to teach new courses also opened up opportunities to uncover new, unexplored research ideas and questions.

Research Enhanced Through Discussions with Students

The survey responses also revealed that discussions with graduate and undergraduate students—both within and outside the classroom—often led to an exchange of ideas that proved valuable for some faculty as they worked through research-related problems. In some cases, the act of articulating research ideas to non-specialists led faculty to a clearer understanding of the purpose and design of their research projects. Supervising student research also proved to be fertile ground for reinforcing sound research methodologies and stimulating interest in new research topics. For example, the survey results included examples of faculty learning from the innovative thinking of students who were at the beginning stages of learning about how to conduct research in the field and who were unfamiliar with the research literature on a specific topic under discussion.

Study of Graduate Students in the Sciences

A study published in the August 19, 2011 issue of Science found that graduate students in the sciences who engaged in research and teaching simultaneously demonstrated greater improvement in their research skills when compared to graduate students who were engaged in laboratory research but not teaching. Unlike other studies that have relied on self-reported improvement in research skills, this study included the use of a rubric to measure the attainment of research skills, before and after a year spent by one group of graduate students—who were engaged in teaching and researching—and a second group—who were exclusively engaged in research.

At the end of the year, the students who were engaged in teaching and research scored higher on measures of demonstrated research skills, including the ability to generate testable hypotheses, use primary scientific literature, select and analyze data, present results, and formulate conclusions about those results. Reflecting on these results, Feldon and his colleagues call for “the reframing of teaching experience as a value-added component of graduate-research training.”

Research and Teaching as Scholarship

While it can be challenging to balance the rigorous demands of teaching and research, the studies reviewed here, and the experiences of Washington University faculty, suggest that teaching and research are not separate, competing endeavors. Rather, teaching and research can be complementary aspects of faculty scholarship, broadly defined. Both involve, for example, mastering disciplinary knowledge and methods, as well as discovering and exploring new questions. Faculty who are interested in discussing and developing interconnections among their teaching and research may contact Gina Frey, Director of The Teaching Center.

References:

Becker, William and Peter Kennedy, “Does Teaching Enhance Research in Economics?” The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 2005), pp. 172-176.

Berret, Dan “Want to be a good researcher? Try teaching,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug (2011).

Feldon, David et al., “Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Research Skills,” Science, Vol 333, August 19, 2011.

Hattie, John and H.W. Marsh. “The Relationship between Research and Teaching: A Meta-Analysis.” Review of Educational Research, 1996, 66(4), pp. 507-42.