According to recent research appearing in Science, the traditional advice to graduate students to minimize their time spent teaching and maximize their time spent on research may ultimately harm the development of their research skills.
Previous research examining the relationship between teaching and outcomes has been difficult to interpret. For example, in one study, 524 students self-reported their publications and presentations, and these numbers were compared between students teaching and conducting research versus students only conducting research. Students teaching had higher presentation and publication rates. But this relied on self-report; would it hold true if we had more objective measures?
In their article, Feldon et al.1 describe their research study in which 95 graduate students within the first three years of their education completed a validated research skills measure at two time points: at the beginning and end of an academic year. The research skills measure involved the creation and revision of a research proposal in the student’s area of interest. No feedback was provided between the two time points.
Analyses revealed that student teacher-researchers were moderately better at generating testable hypotheses (d = .40) and at generating valid research designs (d = .48) than student researchers. This indicated to the authors that “teaching experience can contribute substantially to the improvement of essential research skills.”
Hold on a minute… how did they conclude causality? Teaching experience “contributing” to research skills implies that teaching causes an increase in research skills, but that conclusion is unjustified given the non-experimental design. After a bit of digging in the online supplement, I discovered that they included the Time 1 scores as a covariate in their MANCOVA to attempt to account for pre-existing group differences, but that does not change the fact that this is a correlational study.
Sure, there are differences between groups. The causal element could be group membership (teacher-researcher vs researcher). But it could also be any number of individual differences correlated with group membership but uncorrelated with pre-test scores. Perhaps, as I suggested earlier, more highly skilled/qualified graduate students are attracted to teaching roles? Perhaps students also teaching simply have more to prove? The source of this variance is unclear.
Perhaps more disconcerting – the authors only report 2 of the 10 dimensions as statistically significant in the expected direction. The other 8 were not; in fact, one was even opposite of the hypothesized direction.
Even with these limitations, the results are still interesting. Graduate students teaching do have higher scores on two outcome dimensions, even when controlling for pre-test differences. Why does this happen? Is it causation, or an interaction between graduate student individual differences and time?
In conclusion, I found this study somewhat of a paradox. It is in Science, which is a top-tier journal by any account, but it is a non-experimental design with causal conclusions. So most surprisingly to me, this study proves you can get a correlational design from the social sciences with 95 participants published in Science. Who knew?
- Feldon, D., Peugh, J., Timmerman, B., Maher, M., Hurst, M., Strickland, D., Gilmore, J., & Stiegelmeyer, C. (2011). Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills Science, 333 (6045), 1037-1039 DOI: 10.1126/science.1204109 [↩]
The IKEA Effect refers to the tendency for people to value things they have created/built themselves more than if made by someone else – in fact, nearly as much as if an expert had created the same item. I recently came across a fascinating article by Norton, Mochon and Ariely1 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (i.e. marketing) testing this. Although not scientifically tested until this paper, the effect has been well known among product designers for some time, as the authors explain:
When instant cake mixes were introduced in the 1950s as part of a broader trend to simplify the life of the American housewife by minimizing manual labor, housewives were initially resistant: the mixes made cooking too easy, making their labor and skill seem undervalued. As a result, manufacturers changed the recipe to require adding an egg; while there are likely several reasons why this change led to greater subsequent adoption, infusing the task with labor appeared to be a crucial ingredient.
This suggests that by asking consumers to do a little legwork, you can increase their belief in the value of the product they have created, even if it would have been better constructed by professionals. Perhaps the best-known application of this principle is the theory’s namesake, Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA. IKEA furniture is sold in boxes, with sometimes a great deal of assembly required.
I can attest personally to the power of the IKEA effect. We actually purchased an entire kitchen from IKEA, which I assembled and installed myself. And it is a hundred times better than anything professionals could have made!
As intuitively appealing as this theory is, it was left untested scientifically until this paper, in which Norton and colleagues manipulated several characteristics of the IKEA effect to explore the conditions under which it is most evident. Here’s what they did:
- Experiment 1A: Participants either inspected an IKEA pre-built box or assembled it themselves. Afterward, they were asked to bid on the box they had either seen or built. If their bid was above a random number, they would pay that amount to keep the box; if it was lower, they couldn’t keep it. Participants were also asked to self-report on the value of the box. An effect was found in both cases; on average, participants bid 62% more when they built the box versus when they simply inspected it. On average, participants also self-reported liking the self-built box more than the inspected boxes.
- Experiment 1B: A similar design as Experiment 1A was used, except replacing IKEA boxes with origami cranes and frogs. There were no differences in value between the types of origami (cranes vs frogs), although participants bid 460% more for their own origami creations versus ones created by others, almost the market-driven value of cranes and frogs created by origami experts. The authors also discovered that participants thought others would value their origami creations highly, despite assigning little value to the amateur creations of others.
- Experiment 2: Participants built small Lego sets (10 to 12 pieces) in pairs and were asked to bid on their own and their partners’ sets. Participants were either given a built Lego set (prebuilt condition), asked to build a Lego set (build condition), or asked to build a Lego set and then take it apart (unbuild condition). Participants universally applied more value to their own sets versus those of their partners. Most interestingly, the unbuild condition only produced slightly higher values than the prebuilt condition, while the build condition produced much larger values. Apparently, we placed increased value on assembled objects only if they are completed. Sounds pretty Gestalt to me.
- Experiment 3: Participants were asked to built an IKEA box once again, but this time, a random half of participants were stopped halfway through construction. As expected, incomplete items were not valued as highly as completed items – especially interesting since a successful bid would mean that the participant could finish building the item later.
One of the reasons that the authors used IKEA boxes and tiny Lego kits was to account for increased perceived value in customization. For example, you are likely to value your furniture more if you did something to it to make it better for you personally. In these experiments, no customization was possible, further supporting the idea that it is the act of assembling the items itself that drives this effect.
The authors note, and it is an important caveat, to remember that all of these effects were done with simple, straightforward items. Would the IKEA effect hold in more complex situations? Is this the reason that open source software proponents are so “enthusiastic” about their products while the general market resists them – because those proponents had a hand in developing them? If I assigned a student to edit Wikipedia for the better, am I unknowingly increasing that student’s faith and value placed in Wikipedia? All interesting questions for future research!
- Norton, M., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2011). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love Journal of Consumer Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002 [↩]
Grad School Series: Applying to Graduate School in Industrial/Organizational Psychology
Starting Sophomore Year: Should I get a Ph.D. or Master’s? | How to Get Research Experience
Starting Junior Year: Preparing for the GRE | Getting Recommendations
Starting Senior Year: Where to Apply | Traditional vs. Online Degrees | Personal Statements
Alternative Path: Managing a Career Change to I/O | Pursuing a PhD Post-Master’s
Interviews/Visits: Preparing for Interviews | Going to Interviews
In Graduate School: What to Expect First Year
Rankings/Listings: PhD Program Rankings | Online Programs Listing
So you want to go to graduate school in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology? Lots of decisions, not much direction. I bet I can help!
While my undergraduate students are lucky to be at a school with I/O psychologists, many students interested in I/O psychology aren’t at schools with people they can talk to. I/O psychology is still fairly uncommon in the grand scheme of psychologists; there are around 7,000 members of SIOP, the dominant professional organization of I/O, compared to the 150,000 in the American Psychological Association. As a result, many schools simply don’t have faculty with expertise in this area, leading many promising graduate students to apply elsewhere. That’s great from the perspective of I/O psychologists – lots of jobs – but not so great for grad-students-to-be or the field as a whole.
As a faculty member at ODU with a small army of undergraduate research assistants, I often find myself answering the same questions over and over again about graduate school. So why not share this advice with everyone?
This week, I’d like to continue talking about grad school, but this time from the other side: what to expect during your first year of graduate school. Often students think of graduate school as simply being “the next step” of their education without ever pausing to think about what that 2-to-6-year experience will actually be like. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of what is for most folks their 20s, so the sacrifice of that experience should not be taken likely. Just what will you actually be doing during that time?
The first year is probably the most intense for new graduate students, simply because it is such an incredible change from their college life. But how you experience that change will depend on what kind of student you were. In my experience, there are generally three kinds of students:
- The Overachiever. The overachiever is going to grad school because it is the next great challenge. The overachiever doesn’t score highly on standardized tests as those in the other two categories do (although the overachiever still did quite well – s/he got into graduate school, after all). Where the overachiever excelled was classwork – perfect GPA or near-perfect GPA. The overachiever did this because s/he is incredibly organized and put in as much time as it took to get things perfect. The overachiever got into grad school because of an incredibly powerful work ethic that drove this person to do as well as possible on every challenge s/he faced.
- The Natural. The natural is going to grad school because s/he has raw talent. The natural did well in school – maybe not a perfect 4.0 but close – not because s/he identified study needs and did whatever it took to achieve them, but instead because s/he cruised by on raw talent. If you barely ever studied for a class in college but still got over a 3.5, you’re a natural. The sure sign of a natural is high standardized test scores but weaker GPAs.
- The Ideal Graduate Student. The ideal is going to grad school because s/he has both raw talent and a thirst for achievement. The ideal could have cruised through college with a 3.5, but saw what it would take to push to a 4.0, and went for it. You can spot an ideal because they clearly love learning. The ideal enjoys reading research articles because they help the ideal understand the world just that much better. If you’re the ideal, you’re probably reading this because you’re doing research on graduate school two years early.
If you aren’t the ideal, don’t worry – not many are, even among accepted graduate students. And if you are the ideal, you already have this whole studying/life thing figured out, so you probably don’t even need this advice!
If you’re an overachiever, the challenge in your first year of graduate school will simply be the quantity of work you need to do. You’ll see a clear path from start to finish, understanding what you need to do to achieve everything you need to achieve, but it will be difficult to see how you’ll have enough time in a week in order to get it all done. This is a feeling you will need to learn to accept. You’ll have 80 to 100 hour weeks, and you still won’t get everything done. The biggest challenge for the overachiever is therefore to prioritize research and classes appropriately, being willing to sacrifice your work quality in some areas in order to meet your deadlines. Otherwise, you’ll burn out very quickly.
If you’re a natural, the challenge in your first year of graduate school will be the workload. You have probably become accustomed to putting in very little effort and getting high grades. That is unfortunately about to end. It may not happen on Day 1, but somewhere along the line, you will suddenly find yourself very confused about the material you are learning, and it will be very disorienting. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. It doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly become stupid. Rather, you have been thrown in with a large group of very smart people. Just being smart is not enough to stand out. Now you need to work hard too.
If you are a natural or an overachiever, one of the biggest threats you’ll face is called imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is a psychological condition where it is difficult to accept your own accomplishments. In short, because you’re in grad school and struggling, because you never really had to struggle ever before, you start to feel like a fraud. “I shouldn’t be here.” “Why did they accept me when I clearly can’t cut it?” This is normal. I believe this is more common in women than in men, but it can affect anyone. You were selected to be a graduate student for a reason. We know you don’t know anything yet; that’s why you’re in graduate school. You’re still learning, just much faster than you ever have before. We know it, and you should remember it.
In terms of your day-to-day experience in your first year, this varies widely. You will likely be balancing your days between research and classes, and sometimes working for the university. Try to get a sense from your new adviser as to which of these is most important. Some faculty would prefer you sacrifice classes to research, and others prefer you drop research to focus on your classes if you begin to struggle too much. Just remember that you have input too; don’t be afraid to say, “I think I shouldn’t be doing as much research because I don’t have the time.” Just be absolutely sure that’s true before you say it.
If you didn’t get a fellowship and aren’t taking out huge student loans, you are probably going to be working for the university as part of your compensation package. To accomplish this, you will probably be doing one of five things, and this will likely change from year to year:
- Teaching Assistant (TA). You’ll be assisting a course instructor who is teaching a class. You might grade papers, hold office hours, or a variety of other tasks. You might be asked to attend classes; don’t be afraid to ask the instructor if you can skip classes when your workload is too high. This is the lowest-stress teaching position.
- Section Leader. You’ll be running a section of a course. For example, there might be a large statistics course where the instructor lectures, and you’ll lead a once-a-week lab section. Your lecture/demonstration materials will generally be given to you, so your responsibilities will generally only be to facilitate the section based on what your instructor tells you to do, and grading. This is the middle-stress option.
- Instructor. You’ll be running an entire course! This is everything; course design, writing a syllabus, grading, putting together teaching materials, and classroom management. You generally won’t do this until you already have experience as a TA or section leader. This is the highest-stress option, but the only teaching option that you can put on your vita. If you want to be a professor some day, you’ll need experience teaching a course or two.
- Research Assistant (RA). Lucky! You’ll be paid to conduct research that you probably would have been doing anyway while also holding down a TA. This generally involves designing research studies, running research participants, analyzing results, and writing papers.
- A grant-funded position. These vary greatly. If your mentor has a federally funded project, you could be brought on to fill a variety of roles, e.g. project manager, analyst, or any type of RA role.
If you are concerned about what kind of position you’ll have during your first year and how much time it will take (and you should be concerned), this is something important to ask about during interviews.