What INSPIRE does: using evidence-based practice in your teaching decisions
Channel: Michael Noetel Performance Psychologist
Date: 2021-06-17

http://bit.ly/INSPIREToolkit

As a teacher at a university, there are hundreds of little decisions that add up to a radically different student experience. You need to choose learning objectives, choose assessments, choose learning activities, and choose how to present content. Knowing how to implement all of this is important, but it’s not much good knowing how to implement strategies if the strategies don’t work. So, INSPIRE is fundamentally about helping you to choose and use the best teaching strategies—to choose the ones that work, rather than the ones that don’t.

Good decisions rely on three inputs. First, experts develop skills and knowledge over time, meaning their judgement is a critical component of making a decision. For example, those of us who have been teaching at universities for a while have some intuition about what works and what doesn’t. Decisions also depend on the context, like the values and preferences of the different stakeholders. We might adapt our teaching on the basis of the student cohort or different university policies. But, as we know, both preferences and experts are prone to biases. Our confirmation bias might mean we neglect strategies we haven’t heard of, or students might *prefer* listening passively to lessons, even if we know it’s better when they’re actively engaged.

Because of biases like these, good decisions also use best-practice research evidence. We say “best practice” because, as you know, there’s lots of different types of evidence. These are four examples, and they’re arranged in what's called the hierarchy of evidence. That's because all of them are important but the things on the top build on the ones from the bottom. A series of case studies might become a longitudinal study, which might become a randomized trial, and then a whole lot of randomized trials become a systematic review. A number of systematic reviews can become a meta-review (see example here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/00346543211052329
Open-access pre-print: https://psyarxiv.com/pynzr/)

When we’re trying to use evidence to make decisions, we can try to fit in all of this stuff at the bottom, but then we're trying to balance a whole lot of different research on the same topic. We're trying to weigh up different case studies, different longitudinal studies, all of which have conflicting results. It's a really inefficient and difficult way of using research to inform our decisions, so it’s easy to make mistakes. So, what INSPIRE is designed to do is to help you inform your decisions with systematic reviews. By filling your ‘research bubble’ with this, best-practice evidence, it’s easier to make good decisions more efficiently. Doing so allows you to be across more high-quality research, and it's much less likely that you're going to end up making biased or incorrect decisions.
As an academic, we know you already make good decisions—after all, you decided to watch this video—but we want to help good decision-makers become great.