Teaching and research—happy symbiosis or hidden warfare?

Large-group lecturing in mathematics

“…Some further pressure along these lines has come from the general upsurge in recent years of student activism for better communication with, and deeper concern from, their teachers. Considering the fact that university staff have always spent time in ranking students in order of examination-merit, and themselves in order of research-merit, it is amusing that it is only nowadays that there seem to be attempts to assess, and even to rank, staff on the further basis of teaching ability, a capacity which from neither experience nor evidence (see Page [5]) necessarily correlates with research ability.…”

Conectando investigación y docencia en la universidad: Teaching Research Nexus

“…Esta realidad fue constatada por Webster (1985), quien, tras una revisión de nueve estudios, sostiene que la noción generalizada de que la productividad de la investigación aumenta el rendimiento en la enseñanza no es apoyada por la evidencia empírica. También Elton (1986) critica la insuficiencia de las correlaciones, dado que representan cierta incertidumbre en los resultados obtenidos, indicando que quienes argumentan que esta relación es real (Flood, 1972;Black, 1972) se basan en la tradición universitaria. Algunos años antes, Michalak y Friedrich (1981) corroboraron, a partir de un estudio realizado en una pequeña universidad, que la relación no varía sustancialmente en los rangos ni en las disciplinas, lo que pone en entredicho la política de presionar al profesorado para desarrollar más investigaciones sobre el supuesto de que este hecho vaya a mejorar su enseñanza.…”

Appraisal and Accountability in Higher Education: Some Current Issues*

“…The connection between teaching and research implicit in 'know their subject' has however led to the belief, never properly demonstrated and even argued to be quite probably false (Page, 1972) that research in a subject can directly improve the quality of its teaching. A more probable link, as I have argued, is via the reflective activity of scholarship (Elton, 1986a), although in applied subjects time spent in learning from on-going practice, e.g.…”