The Effects of Expecting to Teach on Learning from Complex Expository Text

As a general rule, teaching is meant to impart knowledge from the teacher to the student, yet research has shown that teaching can be an effective way to improve learning from text for the “teacher” as well as the student. Bargh and Schul (1980) outlined three main components involved in the process of teaching: preparation to teach, presentation of material, and feedback received through answering students’ questions. A provocative claim that some researchers have suggested is that solely engaging in the first of these stages (preparation to teach) can lead to benefits in learning. The goal for the present line of research was to understand whether just having an expectancy to teach might lead to improved learning from complex expository science text and whether an expectancy to teach may improve either memory for text or understanding from text. Expecting to teach led to benefits in recall as well as the quality of processing during study, though no direct benefits of understanding were observed.