The Secret Is Out … Great Researchers Don’t Necessarily Make The Best Teachers (and Vice-Versa)

And so the big secret is out … the best researchers probably don’t 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 one will often be prioritized against the other.

A paper has now been published which concludes 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…