I'm currently teaching a course on medical ethics and telling my students about the movement toward evidence-based medicine. The students are surprised to learn that many medical treatments and practices are based more on tradition than on good evidence of effectiveness. Similarly, a recent article reported that most psychotherapists use methods justified only by their training and personal experience, not by controlled experiments that show the genuine effectiveness of a few techniques such as cognitive-behavioral therapy.
As a university teacher, I shouldn't be smug about these gaps, because evidence is also lacking for educational practices. University courses are still largely taught using methods that haven't changed much since I was an undergraduate four decades ago. We have no reason to believe that the standard university course, with its lectures, textbooks, and exams, is the best way to teach students at this level, or even that it is very effective for most students who receive mediocre grades. Yet even my youngest colleagues are mostly still teaching using traditional methods.
Some of us are experimenting with variations on the traditional style. In my lecture courses with 100-150 students, I take a break halfway through for a 5-minute discussion in which groups of 4 or 5 students actively debate a question I pose to them. At the end of each class, students write a 1-minute essay on a fundamental concept from the day's lecture. These essays give me immediate feedback about how well students are grasping the material, and provide an opportunity for them to ask questions that I try to answer at the beginning of the next class. Writing these essays counts toward 8% of the final mark, giving students an incentive to come to class, which they might otherwise not do given the lecture notes available on the class Web site.
I know from course evaluations that the students like these innovations, but what I don't know is whether these practices are actually helping the students to learn more. It does appear from grades that students who don't come to class regularly do worse than students who attend regularly, but I don't know that non-attendance is the cause of poor performance: both absenteeism and low marks may be the result of another factor such as lack of motivation. I have tried these practices in part because they are consistent with theories of learning that tie it to motivation and emotion. In the metaphor of William Butler Yeats, education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
Nevertheless, I even lack verification that students learn more from taking my Introduction to Cognitive Science course live from me than from taking the on-line version via distance education. Clearly we need a lot more evidence-based education, with carefully controlled experiments to provide some guidance about what works and what doesn't. Many of my students were assessed in grade schools concerning their "learning styles" and classified as verbal, visual, or kinesthetic learners. But a recent review of evidence finds no reason to believe that such classifications lead to improved education.
I tried a sort of experiment for a couple of weeks in my current medical ethics course. I prohibited use of laptops for the Tuesday classes, on the basis of reports that most students are using them for entertainment purposes such as Facebook, chat, email, Twitter, and web browsing rather than educational purposes such as taking notes. I gave up because the prohibition was causing some ill-will and resulted in no noticeable drop in usage of laptops in my Thursday classes. Besides, as a psychologist friend pointed out to me, this wasn't actually much of an experiment, as I wasn't measuring outcomes such as grades and controlling for many possible confounding factors by using standard experimental techniques such as random assignment to conditions.
So I'm embarrassed to admit that my educational practice is little better than ill-trained psychotherapists or ill-informed physicians who rely primarily on their "clinical experience" to justify their practices. Such experience does not always lead to false conclusions, especially when the practitioners have critically considered their methods in the light of the experiences of others as well as themselves, and when there is some reliable background theory. But many bogus enterprises such as astrology and naturopathic medicine also have people claiming clinical experience; and psychological research shows how easily thinking can be distorted by motivated inference, confirmation bias, availability, representativeness, and other natural error tendencies in human cognition.
The issue here is ethical, not just practical. Health professionals such as doctors and therapists have a moral obligation to use methods that are best for their patients, and educators similarly have a moral obligation to use effective teaching techniques. Evidence-based education has barely started to investigate practices in grade schools, and I hope someday it will help a future generation of instructors to do a better job of teaching in universities and colleges. Perhaps we'll even have more evidence-based philosophy ...
