If you invest in research, do you get great teaching?

If you invest in research, do you get great teaching?

We have all seen amazing researchers doing amazing presentations:

But, generally, do researchers make the best teachers?

While many universities put the case that doing excellent research improves teaching, many in academia know that this is probably not the case, and the balancing act of doing research and teaching is a difficult one. So a university will prioritized one over the other.

A recent paper concluded that good researchers did not improve the grades of undergraduate students (published in Economics of Education Review) and the most damning finding is that the most highly cited researchers were more likely to be classified as poor teachers.

The research involved a study of thousands of students, and where the students were allocated different teachers for their course. These teachers were analysed for the quality of the publications. Student performance and teacher feedback were then correlated to research output quality. With undergraduate students, the researchers found that there was a negative correlation between the teaching quality against research output quality. Only in postgraduate studies was there an improvement in the student grades, but the students, again, did not generally rate their highly research active teachers as good teachers.

In the following table from the research paper we can see that the ability of the student was the strongest factor in grade prediction. Have at least one A grade publication does seem to have some correlation to grade performance, especially at MSc level (0.446). We can also see that being a Professor, on average, has little effect on the grades, and in some cases had a negative effect:

Conclusions

And there you go. Putting more money into research doesn’t nescessarily lead to improved teaching. What you really need is … good teachers, and who are supported in selecting teaching as a core part of their work.

References

Palali, A., van Elk, R., Bolhaar, J., & Rud, I. (2018). Are good researchers also good teachers? The relationship between research quality and teaching quality. Economics of Education Review, 64, 40–49.