A recent study coming out of the Cognition and Education Laboratory@NUS caught the attention — came into news — of the British Psychological Society (BPS).
This research was conducted by undergraduate student researchers Mr. Aloysius Koh (pictured left) and Mr. Lee Sze Chi (pictured center) under the supervision of the lab director Associate Professor Stephen Lim (pictured right), and recently published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
The researchers found that, whereas all of the learners studied with the expectation to teach afterwards, those who taught from memory, as did those who merely practised retrieval (without actually teaching), learned significantly better than those who taught off teaching scripts, implicating the critical role of retrieval in the well-known learning-by-teaching strategy.
We interviewed Assoc Prof Lim in regard to the educational implications of this research:
At the university, educators typically incorporate in-class student presentations into the teaching and learning process. Whether students really learn via these presentations remains an open question and warrants research separately, but for now, educators should minimally insure students internalise their materials and present from memory — no script-reading; no peeking at notes.
The original BPS commentary can be accessed here.
Reference
Koh, A. W. L., Lee, S. C., & Lim, S. W. H. (2018). The learning benefits of teaching: A retrieval practice hypothesis. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32, 401–410. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3410