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How Teaching Improves Research Methodology

How Teaching Improves Research Methodology

Sep 11, 2011

STEM graduate students are often encouraged to maximize research and minimize teaching. However, the process of teaching students can provide practice in the application of certain research skills. Feldon et al. (Science, 2011) show that early career graduate students who both teach and do research outperform their counterparts at skills like generating testable hypotheses and designing valid experiments.

Specifically, the study focused on 95 graduate students at one of three universities. Approximately half the students focused solely on research, and the other half researched and taught an inquiry-based physics course. The students were asked to write up research proposals in the early fall and the late spring, and both proposals were graded according to a previously established rubric. The rubric looked at the following criteria:

  • Setting the work in context

  • Use of primary literature

  • Testability of hypotheses

  • Research and experimental design

  • Establishing reliability and validity of measures

  • Selection of data for analysis

  • Analysis of the data

  • Presentation of results

  • Conclusions based on data

  • Identifying limitations of the study

Once the rubrics were collected, a battery of statistical tests (MANCOVA, bootstrap sampling, Cohen's d effect sizes, univariate statistical tests) were used to both control for preexisting differences and gauge the impact of the teaching. The results show that, once the study was controlled for effects such as prior research experience, the graduate students who taught showed much better ability to generate testable hypotheses and valid research designs than those students who solely did research. These results were reported with a 95% confidence interval and a medium effect size as determined by the Cohen's d scores.

David F. Feldon, James Peugh, Briana E. Timmerman, Michelle A. Maher, Melissa Hurst, Denise Strickland, Joanna A. Gilmore, Cindy Stiegelmeyer. "Graduate students' teaching experiences improve their methodological research skills." Science 333, 1037 (2011).