University lecturers engage in two main activities: teaching, and research. Some people believe that the two activities are complements. For example, higher-quality research is associated with a better or deeper understanding of the discipline, which can then be passed onto students with higher-quality teaching. On the other hand, teaching and research may be substitutes. Academics have limited time to devote to each activity, and naturally spending more time on one means less time devoted to the other. That would suggest that higher-quality research would be associated with lower-quality teaching.
So, which is it - complements or substitutes? Past studies I've written about (see here and here) haven't provided good evidence either way. So, I was interested to read this 2018 article by Ali Palali (CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis) and co-authors, published in the journal Economics of Education Review (ungated earlier version here). They first provided a much more thorough explanation than mine above of the mechanisms that might relate teaching and research:
The first type of mechanisms suggests a positive relationship between research quality and teaching quality via complementarity between skills... Conducting research can both enhance proficiency of the teacher in the subject and keep him up-to-date with the latest developments in the discipline. As a result, research activities have a positive impact on teaching quality...
The second set of mechanisms suggests a negative relationship between research quality and teaching quality. Both research and teaching activities require investment of time and effort. Time and effort spend on research reduces the amount of time and effort that can be spent on teaching, unless some activity benefits both research and teaching (e.g. reading a scientific paper can simultaneously contribute to research ideas and to teaching preparation)... A negative relation between research and teaching can also result if (contrary to the first set of mechanisms) teaching and research require a different set of skills. If research requires more specific skills (e.g. synthesis, deduction) than teaching (e.g. communication, mentoring), this can lead to disparities between skill transfers.
Palali et al. used data on student performance from over 9000 students in the BA and MA programmes at Maastrict University in the Netherlands over the period from 2008 to 2013, essentially identifying the relationship between student performance (measured by grades) and the research quality of their teachers. This approach is valid because, after students have chosen their courses:
The Scheduling Department at SBE allocates students into tutorial groups using a computer program. Once the online registration is closed, all students taking the same course are randomly assigned to tutorial groups by a computer program. Subsequently, tutorial teachers are randomly assigned to tutorial groups within a course...
The randomisation ensures that good students are not systematically paired with good teachers (or good researchers, for that matter), and means that the results of the analysis are plausibly causal, rather than simply correlations. They measure research quality using research publication, which in the first instance is a dummy variable that captures whether each academic has any research publications in the previous four years, or alternatively a measure of the total number of research publications in the previous four years. They also use measures of quality based on a dummy variable for whether each academic has any publications in journals rated 'A', 'B', or 'C' (in a classification used at Maastricht University). In their analysis, Palali et al. find that:
Only for master students a positive effect of this research quality measure is found on student grades. Students of teachers with at least one publication the past 4 years have on average 0.35 (in a scale of 0–10) higher grades than those of teachers with no publications in the past 4 years...
...the coefficient estimate for the total number of publications in the last 4 years shows that the total number of publications has no effect on student performance.
Those two measures mostly ignore research quality. However, moving onto their other measures, Palali et al. find that:
The coefficient estimate for master students shows that there is a significant positive effect on student grades for master students. Having a teacher with at least one A level publication in the last four years in associated with a 0.43 higher student grade. This suggests that in master programs students taught by teachers with high quality publications perform better, but students of teachers with many publications do not. Thus, quality seems to be more important than quantity.
So, overall, the results suggest that research and teaching are complements, but only for postgraduate (Masters-level) study. Why might that be? Palali et al. suggest that:
Most of the courses in bachelor programs are mandatory courses at the introductory level. Master courses, on the other hand, are more often elective courses, and are more specialized courses on a specific topic, and followed by students that are more interested and motivated. It is also generally the case that teachers give special topic courses which primarily focus on their field of interest. This can increase the effects of skill transfers and the effects of interactions between teachers and students.
On the other hand, Palali et al. also find little evidence for any relationship between research quality and student evaluations of teaching (also such evaluations have their own problems - see here and the links at the bottom of that post).
So, should we conclude that research and teaching are complements, or that there is no relationship between them? Before we conclude, we need to note that there is a problem with this analysis. Higher-quality teaching should manifest in students doing better in their subsequent studies, not just in the particular course they are studying in at the time. Higher student grades in courses taught by better researchers could simply mean that better researchers grade their students more generously (perhaps so they don't have to spend time on student complaints, and can therefore devote more time to high-quality research). The effect on future grades is relatively easy to check for (such as in studies on teacher value-added, see here). When Palali et al. look at future grades, they find that:
...there are no dynamic effects. Although coefficient estimates are positive, they are small in magnitude and insignificant.
So overall, it remains difficult to say whether good research and good teaching are complements or substitutes.
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