For as long as I can remember, the major research universities in the US have repeated the mantra that “good research makes good teaching”. When challenged about the need for investment in research personnel or facilities by those who think a university’s proper role is to educate undergraduates, university administrators often claim that the institution’s best researchers are also its best teachers. They say that researchers at the cutting edge of their disciplines are better able to provide insight and challenges to their students.

In effect, the claim is that the research enterprise benefits all undergraduates. Indeed, in my former position as a department chair I often made the same argument to parents of prospective students who were concerned about the benefits of sending their children to a research university, as opposed to a liberal-arts college devoted exclusively to undergraduate education.

It is surprising that this motto is repeated so often, particularly because of the lack of any persuasive evidence for its validity. From my own experience as an undergraduate and graduate student, I recall that courses given by leading researchers were as likely to be dreadful as they were to be inspiring. Indeed, I found no correlation between the quality of the course and the research credentials of the instructor. All too often institutions offer “textbook” courses and curricula that present little opportunity for lecturers to enhance their teaching with their experiences of cutting-edge research. In effect, the research enterprise is invisible to the typical undergraduate.

This point was emphasized in the 1998 report of the Boyer commission on educating undergraduates in US research universities. The report of the commission, which was set up by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, states that the research universities “have too often failed, and continue to fail, their undergraduate populations…At many universities, research-faculty and undergraduate students do not expect to interact with each other, and both groups distinguish between teachers and researchers as though the two experiences were not inextricably linked.”

Why academic work gets all the credit

This mindset perseveres throughout the structure of our institutions of higher education. Even at research universities, where most lecturers have to teach only about one course per term, they report spending at least half of their time on teaching and related activities such as student supervision, course administration, exam marking, and lecture and laboratory preparation. Despite these efforts, research accomplishment is generally the primary factor when academic staff are evaluated or considered for promotion. Even the relative standing of academic departments at research universities is based more on the ability of staff to attract extramural research funds than it is on their success at educating undergraduates. This bias also infects the language we use to describe our work: we often speak of teaching “loads” but of research “opportunities”.

Further evidence for the need to improve the teaching of science to undergraduates can be found in an extensive study by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt from the University of Colorado at Boulder (see Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, Westview Press, 1997). They also looked at why students transfer out of undergraduate science degree programmes. Some 90% of students who switched subjects cited poor teaching by science faculty as the main reason for leaving, but even 75% of those who elected not to change complained about poor teaching in their science courses. Common concerns of students, according to the study, were that science faculty “do not like to teach, do not value teaching as a professional activity, and lack, therefore, any incentive to learn to teach effectively”. Students, the report continued, “constantly referenced faculty preoccupation with research as the overt reason for their failure to pay serious attention to teaching undergraduates”.

Happily, the situation is beginning to change. Research universities are increasingly demanding evidence of teaching potential when they hire staff, and of teaching accomplishment when considering promotion and tenure. Still, it is rare to hear of a brilliant young researcher who was denied tenure owing to inadequate teaching, while the academic landscape is littered with the decaying carcasses of those whose probationary periods were characterized by high student evaluation scores but inadequate research grant funding.

Too many of our colleagues begin their teaching careers by emulating their own undergraduate or graduate instructors; we teach as we were taught. While this may be acceptable in graduate classes for PhD students or even perhaps in advanced undergraduate classes for physics majors (although even then I would not recommend such an approach), it is deadly in physics classes that are designed for students in other subjects or that contribute to the university’s general education programme.

Like most researchers, I would not be successful in my research if I relied extensively on concepts and techniques from the 1960s or 1970s; so why should we be any less demanding when it comes to teaching? I am a productive researcher in my field, in part because I work on collaborative projects with expert colleagues and because I attend several conferences each year in my specialist area. Both of these activities reduce considerably the time that I would otherwise spend in acquiring expertise on my own. Success in teaching can be achieved through similar activities, yet few institutions encourage their faculty to pursue them. You can almost hear the sneers: “Collaborative teaching for newly hired faculty? Conferences about teaching physics? Too much time away from pursuing the research agenda.”

Getting to grips with teaching

The Boyer commission is not alone in calling for teaching and research to be more closely integrated at universities, especially when it comes to evaluating the professional activities of academic staff. In a project directed by Robert Diamond of Syracuse University, New York, professional societies representing the various academic disciplines were asked to review the reward system and the standards for judging scholarly accomplishments in their fields. The recommendations from many of the professional societies strongly supported the need to give greater recognition and reward to accomplishments in teaching. As we move toward the academic utopia in which teaching and research are equally valued, I would argue that universities should adopt the motto: “Good teaching makes good research.”

Like good research, good teaching requires certain personality traits that can be developed and nurtured through a successful mentoring process. Most research universities have established a superb record of effectively preparing graduate students for careers in research, but the record of helping them to acquire expertise in teaching is patchy at best. All graduate students (and even some newly hired faculty) are aware of the need to select a good research mentor. So why are they not also encouraged to find a good teaching mentor?

Good teaching must be informed and enhanced by current developments in pedagogy and by the well established outcomes of research in physics education. To discover and apply these developments on one’s own would be a Herculean task that would certainly diminish (or even eliminate) the time available to spend on research. So, as with my research, I try to study and emulate the work of others who could benefit my teaching. In doing so I can be an effective and successful teacher – without having to invest a significant share of my time. I therefore have more time for other work.

This effort involves little more than maintaining a passing familiarity with some of the leading journals of physics pedagogy and attending a physics education conference once a year. However, many departments may be isolated from these sources of information and many newly hired faculty are not encouraged to seek out this avenue for improving their teaching. In the US, for example, just 10-20% of faculty members at research universities are in the American Association of Physics Teachers.

As a partial remedy for this situation, the association has for the past four years offered an annual workshop to help recently hired faculty from the research universities acquire expertise in teaching. This programme, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, has exposed about 250 new faculty to some of the current ideas and techniques in physics teaching that have been shown to be effective in a variety of contexts. The emphasis has been on effective and immediately applicable reforms in physics teaching. Follow-up meetings with the participants suggest that these workshops have had a significant positive impact on their teaching methods and their effectiveness.

Similar schemes to boost the quality of teaching are starting in other countries too. In the UK, for example, the Institute for Learning and Teaching was set up last year to “enhance the status of teaching in higher education, support innovation and recognize the experience and expertise of lecturers”. The institute will run events and workshops for academics, provide networking opportunities, and offer access to the latest research on learning and teaching.

More time for research

In my research I have learned to differentiate the significant work from the pedestrian, and to identify a small subset of researchers whose work is reliable and replicable; in my teaching I have learned to make a similar differentiation. Through this process, I have specifically adopted those innovations that have proven outcomes and that give me the most impact for the least investment of my time. As a result, in my large lecture class in introductory physics, I am enjoying the highest student evaluations of my career while simultaneously seeing student achievement levels soar. And I am finding that the advance preparation and organization that I needed to improve my teaching have left me with more time to do my research.

So, rather than having research productivity serve as an excuse for shoddy teaching, I believe we should encourage universities to view effectiveness in teaching – especially in the undergraduate classroom – as facilitating and enhancing research itself.