Research-led teaching & teaching-led research

Research
-
led teaching &
teaching
-
led

research

Vicki Bruce

Head of School of Psychology

My experience as ug at Cambridge


Final year 1973
-
4


Students chose projects from list offered
–

worked in pairs


Project plus follow
-
up research led to my
first article


Bruce, V.G. & Morgan, M.J. (1975) Violations of
symmetry and repetition.
Perception,

4


239
-
249

(66
citations)




And inspired me to go on to do PhD

Advantages


Advantages for the delivery of high quality teaching
:


Difficult to purchase or plagiarise previous work


UGs learn more about research design and ethics
engaged in novel work. Apprentice researchers.


Often inspired by the experience (as I was myself).


Advantages for staff


Supervisors are more enthusiastic when they are
interested in what has been discovered.


Clear routes for PGRs and RAs to contribute to
teaching and reduce loads on core staff.


Associate staff can use ug project work as a means of
advancing their research agendas
–

they are
therefore more engaged with the teaching itself.


First year practical teaching


More fun for everyone of you/they don’t
know what the answer is


Can use classes to pilot a new method,
or to ask a new question about a well
-
known phenomenon

Perception of face dominates in
ambiguous situations

Introductory practical classes


Engaging illusion for introductory students



We developed a simple but novel method for measuring the strength
of the illusion (Hill was PhD student
–

then postdoc in Japan, now
lecturer UOW, Australia). Method was developed in part to provide
material for student work (teaching
-
led research).



Practical classes at introductory level use the method to ask new
questions about factors affecting the strength of this illusion


References:


Hill & Bruce (1993) Independent effects of lighting, orientation,and stereopsis on the
hollow
-
face illusion.
Perception, 22
,

887
-
897

(
28 citations
)



Hill & Bruce (1994) A comparison between the hollow
-
face and hollow
-
potato illusions.
Perception, 23,

1335
-
1337. (
19 citations
)


Second year students



Again can use practicals/small group projects to
engage/enthuse the students


Tim Brennen (PhD student) was keen to prove his
supervisor’s model was wrong!


Tom Baguley and Jim Bright
-

pair of students
doing a second year project that Tim and I co
-
supervised


Baguley and Bright then did a second experiment
out of interest in their vacation


Tim B did third experiment as part of his PhD






face recognition

person memory

names

Much simplified central stages of Bruce & Young (1986) model of face recognition

Read person description

Provoke tip
-
of
-
tongue state

Show picture of face

Results:



The model won!



Brennen, Baguley, Bright and Bruce (1990). Resolving
semantically induced tip
-
of
-
the
-
tongue states for proper
nouns.
Memory & Cognition, 18
, 339
-
347. (
54 citations
)





Tim Brennen
–

now full professor at Oslo


Thom Baguley
–

SL at Nottingham Trent University


Jim Bright: Professor of Career Education and Development
in the School of Education at Australian Catholic University
(ACU). (He is also a partner in a career consultancy, Bright
and Associates.)

Final year projects


Students can become engaged in a research
programme as apprentices


May still make major individual contributions


Difficult for students to engage in publishable
work if they are left to come up with their own
ideas (cf. Bruce & Morgan, 1975)


So apprenticeship model better for the
students as well as the researcher
-
teacher

Publications included


Bruce V, Henderson Z,
Newman C
, et al.(2001).
Matching identities of familiar and unfamiliar faces
caught on CCTV images
Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Applied
,
7


207
-
218

(25 citations)


Three experiments
-

one funded by a grant, one
conducted by a second year project group
(acknowledged in footnote
–

one of these
students now finishing his first post
-
doc), and
one which was Newman’s final year project
(he’s since done a PhD).

Conclusions


Research
-
led teaching enhances student
experience


Team
-
work, presentation skills, and
novel research reduces risk of plagiarism


May inspire students to go on to
research careers


Teaching
-
led research provides a route
to publications for staff for whom
research is a minor interest