Teacher Development for GTA

Historically, there has been some debate of the connection between teaching and research. This week a new paper was published, which provides additional information for graduate students. The title is "The trade-off between graduate student research and teaching: A myth?” by Shortlidge and Eddy.

The authors considered how increased development in teaching impacted confidence in preparation for research careers; their ability to communicate about their research; and their publication counts. The findings indicate that the research confidence and output of Ph.D. students who "invested" time in learning about effective teaching did NOT suffer. In fact, data revealed a “slight synergy,” i.e., learning about teaching actually appeared to benefit research skills. Therefore, universities can incorporate instructional development into graduate programs without reducing preparedness for a research career.

The study included pedagogical questions on case studies, clickers, concept maps, discussion-based instruction or Socratic method, flipped classroom, problem-based learning and/or inquiry-based learning, process-oriented guided inquiry learning, and think-pair-share. Participants were recruited through Listservs and snowball sampling, or chain referrals. The final sample was 338 students, representing 19 subfields.

Interestingly, teaching experience alone did not increase research communication confidence.

Shortlidge, E. E. & Eddy, S. L. (2018). The tradeoff between graduate student research and teaching: A myth? PLoS ONE 13(6): e0199576.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0199576&type=printable