Durable Benefits of Learning-by-Teaching for Research Question Generation Performance: A Field Experiment

Abstract

Generating good questions is central to scientific inquiry. How can we improve this skill in classrooms? This field experiment showed that teaching others enhances students’ ability to generate higher-order research questions that create new knowledge. Whereas learning-by-teaching often involves delivering face-to-face or video-recorded lectures, we tested its efficient implementation via writing a verbatim (i.e., word-for-word) teaching script, exactly as how one would orate a lecture. In a research and statistical methods course, 199 undergraduates studied statistical concepts by writing verbatim teaching scripts or study notes. One month later, students’ long-term learning was assessed on a high-stakes test, whereby they explained the concepts, applied them to design a study to test a given hypothesis, and generated create-level research questions about the concepts. Writing teaching scripts enhanced students’ research question generation and concept application more than writing study notes. The teaching advantage for these higher-order outcomes held although both techniques produced comparably high basic understanding when students explained the concepts at test. Further, students displayed greater generative processing, metacognitive monitoring, and social presence when writing teaching scripts than study notes. Learning-by-teaching can be leveraged in an efficient and inexpensive way via writing verbatim teaching scripts to improve meaningful, durable learning in classrooms.

Keywords:

• Explaining
• generative learning
• learning by teaching
• question generation
• field experiment

Authors’ contribution

Stephen Wee Hun Lim served as lead for investigation, resources, and data curation, contributed equally to conceptualization, methodology, and writing–original draft, and served in a supporting role for formal analysis and writing–review and editing. Sarah Shi Hui Wong served as lead for formal analysis, writing–original draft, and writing–review and editing, and contributed equally to conceptualization and methodology. Piyawan Visessuvanapoom served in a supporting role for resources and writing–review and editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The authors declare no competing interests, and thank Esther Clare Xin Yi Ng and Sze Chi Lee for their invaluable assistance with data scoring.

Notes

1 Submissions were received from six students two weeks in advance of the due date, nine students one week in advance, and the remaining 184 students during the last week.

Additional information

Funding

This research was conducted with ethics approval from the Institutional Review Board of the National University of Singapore, and in part supported by a Chulalongkorn University Visiting Scholar Grant (Academic Year 2019, 2022) awarded to Stephen Wee Hun Lim.