Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills
Abstract
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students are often encouraged to maximize their engagement with supervised research and minimize teaching obligations. However, the process of teaching students engaged in inquiry provides practice in the application of important research skills. Using a performance rubric, we compared the quality of methodological skills demonstrated in written research proposals for two groups of early career graduate students (those with both teaching and research responsibilities and those with only research responsibilities) at the beginning and end of an academic year. After statistically controlling for preexisting differences between groups, students who both taught and conducted research demonstrate significantly greater improvement in their abilities to generate testable hypotheses and design valid experiments. These results indicate that teaching experience can contribute substantially to the improvement of essential research skills.
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Published In
Science
Volume 333 | Issue 6045
19 August 2011
19 August 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 10 February 2011
Accepted: 21 June 2011
Published in print: 19 August 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: This work is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to D.F., M.M., B.E.T., J. Lyons, and S. Thompson (NSF-0723686). The views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the supporting funding agency. Data used to conduct the reported analyses can be found in (22).
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