Mirjam Glessmer and Timo Lüth leading a workshop for university instructors

You learn better when you think that you will have to teach

Have you ever worked as student tutor? Then you’ve probably felt like you understood the content of the course you tutored a million times better after tutoring it. Or at least that’s what I hear over and over again: People feel like they understood a topic. Then they prepare to teach it, and realise how much more there was to understand and that they actually understood it.

And there is research that shows that you don’t actually need to teach in order to get the deeper understanding, it is enough to anticipate that you will teach: “Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages” by Nestojko, Bui, Kornell & Bjork (2014).

In that article, two groups of participants are given texts that they are to study. One group is told that they will be tested on the text, the other one that they will have to teach someone else who then will be tested. After all participants study the text, they are then all tested (and nobody gets to teach). But it turns out that even expecting to teach had similar benefits to what we see in student tutors who actually taught: Participants expecting to teach have a better recall of the text they had to study, can answer more questions about it and especially questions regarding main points.

So what does that mean for teaching? As the authors say: “Instilling an expectation to teach […] seems to be a simple, inexpensive intervention with the potential to increase learning efficiency at home and in the classroom.” And we should definitely use that to our advantage! :-)

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