Research performance and teaching quality in the Spanish higher education system: Evidence from a medium-sized university

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between research performance and teaching quality in the context of the Spanish university system. We investigate whether there is a relationship between being an active researcher and teaching quality of college professors in Spain. We use a data set from the University of Extremadura, which contains information on teaching evaluations and research performance over a ten year period (from 2001–2002 to 2011–2012). Our results suggest that, on average, professors who are more involved in research obtain better results in their teaching evaluations. We also suggest that this positive link between research and teaching is non-linear, as we find a larger improvement in teaching quality from additional research at lower levels of research intensity. Additionally, we show that the relationship between teaching and research is not constant along the distribution of teaching scores, and that the teaching quality of professors in the lower quantiles is much more related to their research intensity than that of professors in the top quantiles.