The Powerful Teacher: A Power Hypothesis for the Benefits of Learning-by-Teaching

Abstract Why does teaching others enhance one’s learning? This study advanced a novel power hypothesis of learning-by-teaching: When assuming the role of a teacher, students experience a heightened sense of power in influencing others, which increases their own learning. University students ( N = 242) studied a scientific text using one of three learning methods: notetaking, explaining, or teaching. The notetaking group prepared to be tested and wrote study notes about the topic; the explaining group prepared to explain and wrote an explanation about the topic as how they would write a textbook for their peers; the teaching group prepared to teach and wrote a verbatim teaching script about the topic as how they would orate a lecture to their peers. All students were then tested on generating research questions that create new knowledge about the topic, as well as their basic comprehension. Teaching or explaining to others improved students’ research question generation and comprehension more than writing study notes for their own learning. Crucially, teaching produced superior research question generation performance than explaining, and this advantage held even after controlling for comprehension. The teaching group reported experiencing more power than the explaining and notetaking groups, which mediated the advantage of teaching over explaining, as well as that of teaching and explaining over notetaking, for research question generation performance. An increased sense of power in a teacher potentially accounts for the learning benefits of teaching in enhancing one’s research question generation performance. Indeed, teaching is powerful.