The protégé effect describes how people learn more, and put more effort into learning, when they expect to teach the material to someone else.
Where it comes from
Psychologists John Bargh and Yaacov Schul showed in 1980 that people who studied material in order to teach it learned it better than people who studied it for a test.¹ The name came later, from Daniel Schwartz and colleagues at Stanford. In their studies, eighth graders taught biology to a computer character called Betty. Students who believed they were teaching Betty spent more time on the material and learned more than students who used the same software for themselves, and lower-achieving students gained the most.² A 2014 study found the same pattern with college students: expecting to teach led to better recall and better-organized knowledge, even though in the end nobody taught.³
Where it goes wrong
Teaching is often treated as a learning method that works on its own. The details decide. In a 2018 study at the National University of Singapore, students who taught a lesson from memory learned about as much as students who simply practiced recalling it. Students who taught by reading from a prepared script did no better than a control group.⁴ Much of the benefit seems to come from pulling knowledge out of memory and building our own explanation, the same mechanism behind the testing effect.
Talent Takeaway
When someone on the team learns something new, we can ask them to explain it to a colleague, from memory and without slides. Saying so at the start helps twice: the expectation sharpens how they learn, and the explaining makes it stick.
¹ Bargh, J. A., & Schul, Y. (1980). On the cognitive benefits of teaching. Journal of Educational Psychology, 72(5), 593–604. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.72.5.593
² Chase, C. C., Chin, D. B., Oppezzo, M. A., & Schwartz, D. L. (2009). Teachable agents and the protégé effect: Increasing the effort towards learning. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18(4), 334–352. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-009-9180-4
³ Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & Cognition, 42(7), 1038–1048. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-014-0416-z
⁴ Koh, A. W. L., Lee, S. C., & Lim, S. W. H. (2018). The learning benefits of teaching: A retrieval practice hypothesis. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 32(3), 401–410. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3410
Further reading: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2013). The relative benefits of learning by teaching and teaching expectancy. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38(4), 281–288.
