Why does teaching others improve learning? Researchers at Singapore Management University and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand propose a novel power hypothesis of learning-by-teaching: When assuming the role of a teacher, students experience a heightened sense of power in influencing others, which increases their own learning.
In this study published in Educational Psychology Review, 242 university students were give a scientific text to study using one of three learning methods: notetaking, explaining, or teaching. The notetaking group prepared to be tested and wrote study notes about the topic; the explaining group prepared to explain and wrote an explanation about the topic as how they would write a textbook for their peers; the teaching group prepared to teach and wrote a verbatim teaching script about the topic as how they would orate a lecture to their peers.
Before beginning the 24-minute study period, participants answered a questions regarding their how well they thought they knew the topic prior to reading it, how well they thought they would perform, and their level of interest in the topic. After the study period, the participants answered questions that measured their sense of power (capacity to influence others), how much of the material from the study text they thought they would remember later, and their subjective learning experience (such as the difficulty of the topic, how much they enjoyed learning about the topic, etc.).
Benefits of learning-by-teaching
All participants were then tested on understanding the topic and creating research questions. Both teaching and explaining improved comprehension and helped students generate better research questions than notetaking. Furthermore, teaching outperformed explaining in creating research questions, and this was still true even when the researchers controlled for comprehension, indicating that the result was not merely driven by an better understanding of the text.
One potential explanation is that the participants in the teaching group reported feeling more powerful; that the mere act of taking on the role of a teacher — even without interacting with an audience — was sufficient to instill a sense of power. The researchers suggest that in learning-by-teaching contexts, feeling powerful as a teacher could instill a sense of responsiblity for learning outcomes, as well as, motivate students to improve their own deep learning and master the material in order to better teach it to others.
Interestingly, the participants did not recognize the advantages of teaching, seeing it as equally effective as notetaking and explaining, despite improved test results. The researchers suggest that in general, students who lack confidence in the subject matter may be less likely to voluntarily participate in teaching opportunities, therefore learning about the powerful advantages of teaching would be especially beneficial for these students.
StepUp Note
In this research we see that teaching was more effective than teaching by note taking or explaining. Teaching by talking gives students a chance to actively test out, clarify and respond to the teacher’s ideas. This gives students a chance to understand the context, or pattern, of what they are learning. In the same way, StepUp exercises present pieces of information (math, reading, handwriting) in the context of information patterns which make the information easier to learn and remember.
Note by Nancy W Rowe, MS, CCC/A