ARTICLE # 2 | 19
TEACHING AND RESEARCH SYNERGY IN A COMPETENCY BASED EDUCATION ERA
of discovery and of integration with the pursuit of scholarship of teaching ( Schulman , 2004 ).
This review sets out to explore these issues and aims to review the current situation as it relates to the interplay between research and teaching and how they could promote knowledge acquisition and dissemination in the context of learning communities and society at large by reconciling tension when it arises .
Reconciling tension
Teaching and research are two valuable interrelated entities in the student learning process ( Hattie and Marsh , 1996 ). Multiple perspectives have been developed over the years on the interaction of students with a learning situation . Two major schools or models have been discussed : the “ Learning Styles ” model and the “ Approach to Learning ” model ( Entwistle , 1995 ). The Learning Style was more promoted among US education management personnel , US authors and scholars , while the Approach to Learning model was more favored by field educators in the UK and Australia , a country very much affected by the UK education system . However , it was stressed by many authors that the focus should be the learner , the student and the way he or she acquired data , processed knowledge , and used what he / she learned ( Lueddeke , 2008 , Shulman , 2004 ). In a report by Feldon and co-workers published in 2011 in the journal Science , it was concluded that in order to be a good researcher , one should try teaching . This report arrived amid an intensifying national USA debate about the proper balance between teaching and research by college faculty and its claim ran somewhat counter to the conventional wisdom underlying the training and rewarding of graduate students in the sciences , where teaching is generally seen as a distraction from research . The study reported that graduate students in the sciences , who teach and conduct research , showed greater improvement in their research skills than do those who focus exclusively on laboratory work . They usually demonstrated significantly greater improvement in their abilities to generate testable hypotheses and design valid experiments . The study covered 95 graduate students at 3 Universities from 2007 to 2010 . It resulted in important empirical data and it sparked a good debate , but it was also an extension of a debate-established before-hand , tended to point at the disaggregation of teaching and research ( Feldon et al . 2011 ).
In 1996 , John Hattie and H . W . Marsh , then researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Western Sydney , respectively , surveyed the scholarly literature on