The power of graduate student teaching (cites Eric Bettinger's research)

There’s surprisingly little research on the effects of graduate student instruction on undergraduates and of teaching experience on graduate students’ eventual careers. But conventional wisdom suggests that seasoned faculty members make better undergraduate instructors and that graduate students benefit from more time spent on finishing their dissertations than on teaching. For those reasons and others, some institutions -- most recently Purdue University -- have taken steps toward increasing faculty-undergraduate interaction and limiting the use of graduate students as instructors.

But what if those institutions have it backward, and graduate students are actually better ambassadors of their disciplines than full-time faculty members on and off the tenure track? What if the graduate students actually benefit in the long run from more teaching experience? New research on the impact of graduate student teaching on undergraduates and on graduate students’ preparation argues just that. And while the authors caution that their research is limited, they argue it may have significant implications for university policy.

“We find that undergraduates who take their first course in a given subject from a graduate student are nearly twice as likely to subsequently major in that subject compared to their peers who take the same course from full-time faculty,” reads “When Inputs Are Outputs: The Case of Graduate Student Instructors.” The study, in press in Economics of Education Review, also says that “graduate students who teach more frequently are more likely to graduate in a timely manner and more likely to subsequently be employed by a college or university in their early careers.”

Both sets of results -- outcomes for undergraduates as well as graduate students -- “are important for researchers and policy makers to consider simultaneously. … The trade-offs between undergraduate and graduate education are not necessarily severe,” conclude authors Eric Bettinger, associate professor of education and economics at Stanford University; Bridget Terry Long, academic dean and the Saris Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard University; and Eric S. Taylor, an assistant professor of education at Harvard.

Read the entire article at Inside Higher Ed.