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Three evidence-based books for better teaching

19 Sep 2018 Tags: Course design

I’ve read many books on effective university education, covering a range of topics and perspectives. An annotated bibliography of them all would be a long post.

At any given time, however, there’s a small subset of those books that directly drive my decisions. Here are three books that I refer to routinely in my current course designs.

All three take an evidence-based approach, grounding their claims of effectiveness in reliably-determined research results. From this broad starting point, they travel to distinct destinations, at very different levels: the big issues of teaching (practice, motivation, assessment, …), specific activities you can ask your students to perform, and myths that have entered into received wisdom.

I am intimidated by the effort it must have required to prepare each of these books. The authors had to read and synthesize the results from hundreds of papers, discarding those with questionable research designs or low experimental power. Then they had to derive their synthesis at a more abstract level, isolating broader principles that might be applied in a range of teaching contexts. This is a tremendous service, as few instructors will have the time to read even a fraction of the requisite articles.

These very different books complement each other well. Read them, apply their ideas, and your own teaching will surely improve. They demonstrate the value of an evidence-based approach to the teaching literature. Let’s have more like these.

The first two recommendations are courtesy of Greg Wilson, whose writings and conversations have had a tremendous impact on my teaching.

Informed Principles: Your Overall Course Design

This first book is the single best starting starting point for course and curriculum design. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching is organized around seven “research-based principles”:

  1. Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder their learning.
  2. The way students organize knowledge influences how they learn and apply what they know.
  3. Students’ motivation generates, directs, and sustains what they do to learn.
  4. To develop mastery, students must acquire component skils, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.
  5. Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback are critical to learning.
  6. Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectucal climate of the course to impact learning.
  7. To become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed.

As ever, the details are what really matters and the authors deliver those in abundance, identifying the elements instructors have to have in place to successfully support these principles and create the most effective learning environment for their students. All claims are supported by references to reliably-supported research results.

With its focus on broad principles arching over all of education, regardless of level and domain, this book provides a modern, evidence-grounded framework for thinking about any course.

This is the sort of book that one has to read multiple times, with intervening gaps of practice, to derive most benefit. Writing this summary has reminded me it’s time for a reread.

Informed Activities: Things Your Learners Can Do

Where “How Learning Works” explored the big picture of course design, Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success takes a bottom-up approach, introducing 101 activities whose effectiveness is supported by empirical results. The book organizes these activities into eight chapters, with titles such as “Discussion” or “Writing to Learn”.

Each chapter begins with an overview of the activity type, distinguishing this type of activity from others with similar names but distinct structures. The authors summarize the broad empirical results regarding this type. They next categorize the several forms this type of activity might take, such as whole-class discussion versus dividing the class into discussion dyads. They conclude the overview with evidence-based recommendations for how to organize these activities for most effective learning outcomes.

Following the overview, the authors provide detailed descriptions of all the activities of this type. They call these activities IDEAs, an acronym for Intentionally Designed Educational Activities. For each IDEA, they describe its structure, its likely learning benefits, and the research supporting its use.

This isn’t the sort of book I’d read cover to cover. The long lists of IDEAs can be numbing. However, the chapter introductions are a tremendous resource in their own right. The introductions provide a fantastic overview of the essential types of class activity, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. I find the recommendations on effective implementation of each activity particularly useful. Taken together, the introductions orient each activity in light of all the others. I finished the book with a sense of how these disparate pieces fit.

I also gained from some of the authors’ careful distinctions between similar-sounding activities that in fact have quite different outcomes. For example, the authors categorize “Socratic dialogue” under “Lecturing” rather than “Discussion groups” because classic Socratic technique has a specific, planned sequence of points, as opposed to the freer topic choices characterizing discussion. Whether or not you agree with such characterizations, simply considering them will clarify your own practice.

Informed Skepticism: Contesting Unsupported Myths

Where the first two books describe approaches to teaching and learning that are well-supported by evidence, Urban Myths About Learning and Education focuses instead on those widely-assumed assumptions that have in fact been contradicted or unsupported by evidence. Where the first two books make you a more successful teacher, this short book makes you a more successful skeptic, fending off the mountebanks and sellers of educational snake oil.

Their introductory chapter sets the agenda:

We have become saddled with a multiplicity of methods, approaches, theories and pseudotheories, many of which have been shown by science to be wrong or, at best, only partially effective. The purpose of this book is to initiate a big clear-out of myths about learning and education, for everyone involved in the educational process: teachers, schools, parents, boards of education, educational policy-makers and politicians. (Ch. 1)

Given the book’s broad sweep, not every section will be useful to an educator, though they may prove useful in arguments with the people controlling educational funding.

As an appetizer, the authors begin with a critique of “Maslow’s Pyramid” [link to an example of the myth, not the book’s critique]. I write the name in quotes because this book’s authors point out that:

With this as preface, successive chapters tackle myths from several big topics in education:

followed by a concluding chapter about the persistence of myths and how the reader can avoid falling prey to myths.

The opening paragraph of the final chapter is an apt summary of all three books I’ve discussed in this post:

In order to implement valuable ideas from educational research into practice, the educational sciences must be driven by theories, not by simple observations. These theories must be based on strong empirical data gained from methodologically valid experiments, rather than legends, hypes and unsound research, and tested in real-life settings before proceeding with large-scale implementation. (Ch. 6)

Taken together, they give you useful, reliable ways to think about your class as a whole, to design individual activities in that class, and to avoid the traps of myths presented as received wisdom.