There are six evidence-based teaching practices that are critically impacting the way that faculty create and implement curriculum in the evolving world of hybrid education: transparency; active learning; formative practice; learning data use; supports for metacognition and learner agency; and inclusive learning environment.
During a day-one session at REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit hosted by Arizona State University, Barbara Means, Executive Director of Learning Sciences Research at Digital Promise Global, offered the audience tips for using data to keep students engaged, enrolled and succeeding both online and offline, post the pandemic.
Means introduced three pillars that formulate evidence-based teaching practices in higher education: fundamental theories of how people learn; instructor performance; and the implementation of one or more of the six critical teaching practices.
The first pillar of evidence-based practice hinges on research about how people learn. Referencing the book “How People Learn,” Means discussed nuances of how students take in information and retain it. First and foremost, she noted that without engagement, students will never grasp a new concept. Other keys to learning, according to the 2000 publication, are the organization of knowledge in a framework that a person can retain, plus giving students clear goals and the ability to monitor their own progress.
Means went on to discuss some updated information about how students learn that came out in the second iteration of “How People Learn,” released in 2018. The follow-up book goes into more depth about various types of learning: habit formation, perceptional motor, observational, fact learning, pattern recognition and model-based learning.
Also, Means stressed the central role that culture plays in a person’s ability to learn.
“An instructor’s actions can show students his acceptance or irrelevance of their culture,” Means said. “The healthy brain does not spend time on learning something it does not care about.”
The second pillar to evidence-based teaching that Means discussed is the importance of the faculty role in learning. Means stressed that while technology is important as an enabler, it’s not a solution for educating people. In other words, the class instructor should remain the key factor in a student’s hybrid learning environment.
Also, over the past year, Means has learned that faculty needs to delicately balance the use of technology in creating courses so that the class remains inclusive and doesn’t become too much of a financial/technological burden for some students. For example, faculty who have students learn asynchronously all of the time can lose students to lack of feeling removed and not part of a larger community.
“It leads to a much more conservative and didactic one-way transmission of instruction,” she said. Plus, “If it’s all asynchronous, it’s less motivating.”
The third and final pillar is the implementation of the six evidence-based teaching techniques within a hybrid learning environment.
A recent Digital Promise study co-authored by Means looked at the impact of evidence-based teaching interventions on student outcomes. Based on 141 papers submitted to academic journals, the study found that the most prevalent intervention used by college faculty was transparency: offering specific learning goals and expectations for students from the outset of a course.
Means ended her discussion by explaining that her preferred method of evidence-based teaching when leading a group is relevancy.
“I make sure what we’re working on is relevant and important to people I’m working with,” Means said. “And I like to get a sense of what they know and don’t know so I can tailor the content.”
She supports building relevancy by having groups work in collaboratives ways so that they are actively learning and gaining knowledge and feedback from peers.
The annual REMOTE summit is hosted by ASU and attended by more than 50,000 higher education administrators and faculty from around the world. The entire summit is available on demand here.
For other REMOTE coverage see:
Lessons Learned From the Pandemic Will Forever Shape Higher Education