Based Learning 5: EBL — Evidence-Based Learning

EBL — Evidence-Based Learning

Evidence-based education is an approach to all aspects of education — from policy-making to classroom practice — where the methods used are based on significant and reliable evidence derived from experiments.

How it Works:

1. Evidence-based learning refers to any concept or strategy that is derived from or informed by objective evidence — most commonly, student performance.
2. If an educational strategy is evidence-based, educators compile, analyze, and use objective evidence to inform the design an academic program or guide the modification of instructional techniques.
3. By looking at absenteeism, disciplinary infractions, and course-failure rates, teachers can identify students who are more likely to struggle, and they can then proactively prepare academic programs, services, and learning opportunities to reduce the likelihood that those students will fail or drop out.
4. In this case, educators are taking an evidence-based approach to instructing and supporting students. This is often called an “early warning system.”

Impact:

1. The use of objective evidence in education reform has grown, and a wide variety of research and data are now regularly used to identify strengths and weaknesses in schools, guide the design of academic programming, or hold schools and teachers accountable for producing better educational results.
2. With the growing use of evidence, educators now have access to more objective, precise, and accurate information about student learning, academic achievement, and educational attainment.

An Evidence-Based Approach to Learning:

1. Students learn new ideas by relating them to what they already know, and then transferring them into their long-term memory.
2. Students remember information better when they are given many opportunities to practice retrieving it from their long-term memories and think about its meaning.
3. Problem-solving and critical-thinking skills are developed through feedback and depend heavily upon background knowledge.
4. For students to transfer their abilities to new situations, they need to deeply understand both the problem’s structure and context.
5. Student motivation depends on a variety of social and psychological factors.
6. Misconceptions about learning, while prevalent in education, shouldn’t determine how curricula are designed or how instruction is provided.

Concerns:

1. Debates about evidence-based approaches to education or school reform depend largely on the evidence and context in question, including how the available evidence is specifically being used or not used.
2. The quality of available evidence, as well as the methods used to interpret research and data, can also contribute to ongoing debates. As in many other fields and professions, education is fraught with conflicting viewpoints, beliefs, and philosophies that can give rise to the misinterpretation or distortion of seemingly concrete and objective evidence.
3. It is also worth noting that while both quantitative and qualitative evidence are widely used in education, there is a debate about how these different types of evidence should be weighed and considered.

Teaching Strategies Contradict Scientific Evidence:

1. Making things less cognitively demanding for learners by simplifying content and tasks;
2. Assigning activities because they are enjoyable, without assessing their learning outcomes;
3. Providing more feedback and guidance than is truly needed, which can impair learning, even while benefiting immediate performance.

Few Critical Points:

1. Evidence-Based Learning does not simply mean that we follow research-based prescriptions.
2. Evidence-Based Learning requires us also to measure our own performance. In other words, we ought to be routinely gathering good EVIDENCE about how well our learning interventions are working. Only by having feedback loops can we learn from our performance.
3. Evidence-Based Learning requires us also to build continuous cycles of improvement into our practices. After gathering and analyzing the evidence, we need to act on it. Then we need to evaluate and analyze and act again.

Resources to Implement EBL:

1. Top 10 Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies:https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/top-10-evidence-based-teaching-strategies--385277/
2. Edmodo: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/based-learning-5-ebl-evidence-based-learning--385279/