Research Quality Gives Better Student Experience … Not Proven!
Better Teaching Does
In government circles, there is a feeling that the more you invest in research at university level, the higher the quality of the teaching will be. Personally, I see no such link, in that high-quality researchers often buy themselves out of teaching, and where universities can put their resources into research rather than teaching. There is also no guarantee that what you invest in, in your research, will filter through into teaching.
From what I see too, there is good and not so good research that is undertaken, and, in some cases, the linkage between research topics and the topics that need to be taught to students is perhaps not always as strong as it could be. The UK, perhaps, his heading to a two-tier system of academics who are research-active or teaching-active, and the days of the great teacher who is highly research-active are perhaps receding.
So what evidence is there? Well, my little open-source bots have been grabbing data from The Times University 2016 survey [data]. First, we will plot student experience against teaching quality [here][Web page]:
