Making Academics Teach Improves Their Research Skills

In "Learning On-line Tertiary Teaching for Research-Led Education" I suggested how the teaching burden on early career academics could be reduced by training them in on-line mentoring. But new research suggests that the process of teaching may also help new academics to be better researchers. So teaching would be of benefit to both the teacher and the student (I learn a lot from my students):

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.

From: "Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills" (Feldon and others, Science 19 August 2011: 333 (6045), 1037-1039 DOI: 10.1126/science.1204109.