Having “good” researchers teach undergraduate students does not improve their grades, according to a study in the Economics of Education Review, which also found that students rated highly-cited researchers as poor teachers.

The study analysed the grades and teacher evaluations of thousands of students from the University of Maastricht’s School of Business and Economics, where students are randomly allocated teachers for a particular course but are given the same exam at the end. The study then measured the research quality of teachers by their publication records. It found that having teachers with a large number of publications or articles in highly respected journals didn’t result in students getting better grades or in those teachers getting high ratings.
The only exception was that Masters students were found to get better grades when they were taught by teachers with high-quality publications, although the study found that the Masters students did not in turn rate them as good teachers. Overall, bachelor’s students gave lower than average scores to teachers with strong publication records.

Roel van Elk from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, one of the report’s authors, told Times Higher Education that they had been unable to find a link between high-quality researchers and good-quality teaching, particularly at undergraduate level. Addressing the relationship between the research quality of academics and their teaching performance is important because it can help universities distribute resources more efficiently, he says. For example, if leading researchers are asked to do teaching, it may be better to allocate them to Masters programmes, he argues.

According to van Elk, it makes sense that Masters students get better results from high-quality researchers who are experts in their subject “as Masters courses are more specialised in the interest areas of teachers and taken by relatively motivated students, whereas undergraduate courses are more generalised”.