Collaborative Research: Exploring the Value of Learning by Teaching

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

It is a common intuition that one of the best ways to learn something is to attempt to teach it to others. The research project is testing this intuition and its usefulness for educational practice. Central to the work are web-based "teachable agents" that students teach as a way to learn themselves and that permit studies of the active ingredients of learning by teaching. The project will use the agents to help students learn science and mathematics content and help teachers learn content-specific pedagogy. The intellectual merit of the work is that the agents provide a method for developing and testing a learning theory that helps explain the motivational and cognitive benefits of learning by teaching. By manipulating a teachable agent's available features and use (something that is hard to do with actual pupils), it is possible to experimentally isolate different components of the learning by teaching interaction. A primary measure used to evaluate whether students learn by teaching includes assessments of students' abilities to subsequently learn from resources once they have completed their teaching activities. The broader impacts include a new way of helping teachers understand the learning of their students, and the development of easily distributed, software that embodies new learning principles so that others in schools and industry can learn from those artifacts and create new ones of their own.