Learning by Teaching

Shawn Coffeen, PharmD

PGY1 Pharmacy Resident 

MedStar Montgomery Medical Center

Take a moment to think back to when you were a student in pharmacy school on one of your first clinical rotations. You might have been told that you would need to do a presentation to an audience outside of your peers. It did not matter if the room was full of practicing pharmacists or full of high school students that knew nothing about pharmacy, you were likely nervous and questioned if you knew the material well enough to teach it. However, you still relied on your prior knowledge to start the early stages of preparing for the presentation. The next step involved doing your own research to prepare the presentation and increase your knowledge for potential questions that might be asked. Overall, at the end of presentation you knew a lot more about the subject than you did before. This process of learning new material through teaching others is known as learning-by-teaching. The purpose of this blog post is to explore recent literature regarding learning-by-teaching.

The effectiveness of this method has been studied over the years. One involved students studying a short lesson on the Doppler Effect with the expectation of later teaching the learned material. Those students were compared to students that did not have that expectation. Paper-based comprehension test was used to assess each groups understanding of the subject. Both groups were provided the same amount of time to learn the material. At the end of the short lesson the teaching group scored on average 8.7 out of 13 possible points. This was higher than the control group which had an average score of 6.2 and this difference was statistically significant. This difference persisted even after 1 week from the lesson with average score of 2.3 points higher than the control group. This study demonstrated the impact of learning-by-teaching is observed even in the setting of a short lesson. Authors of this study suggested that the expectation of teaching encouraged learners to select the most relevant information from the lesson, organize it into meaningful representation, and integrate it with prior knowledge.1

A very similar experiment was completed by the same investigators to further examine the impact of learning-by-teaching. Simple and enhanced lessons of the Doppler Effect were used this time. Authors found that students that had the expectation to teach outperformed those that only expected an exam, regardless of the lesson. Additionally, the authors studied if the teaching effect was strongest in those that prepared to teach or prepare for test before teaching. Half of the students in each group did not perform the act of teaching to further assess if the act of teaching influences performance. It was found that those that prepared to teach and taught outperformed all other groups with a statistically significant difference of about 15% on the delayed exam. This demonstrated that the additional time with the material through teaching did not impact observations in previous experiments. It was the act of teaching coupled with teaching that impacts long-term learning the most.2

It is obvious that teaching has an impact on learning based on these experiments. Preparing to teach impacts short term learning while the combination of preparing to teach with the corresponding action increases long-term learning. The results of these experiments were not unexpected. If you think back to that teaching experience from pharmacy school, you may still remember a lot from it. Now if you were to reflect on material you learned from earlier in pharmacy school like the Krebs Cycle, which your ability to understand was assessed through testing, it is likely that you may not remember much about it. In fact, you may have to look up the actual cycle and review it to be able to effectively recall information about it.

The question is what to do with this information. I suggest that more teaching experiences become offered to students to increase their learning. It does not matter if it is a traditional education setting like a university or untraditional setting involving patients. These experiences do not require large audiences. All that is recommended is setting the expectation of teaching on the learner and have them teach you or others. I personally will be setting the expectation on my patients in a diabetes bootcamp program to teach me how to use their glucometer and what the results mean in later visits.

References:

1. Fiorella L, Mayer RE. The relative benefits of learning by teaching and teaching expectancy. Contemporary Educational Psychology. 2013 Oct 1;38(4):281–288.

2. Fiorella L, Mayer RE. Role of expectations and explanations in learning by teaching. Contemporary Educational Psychology. 2014 Apr 1;39(2):75–85.