The “Active Ingredients” Approach to the Development and Testing of Evidence-based Instruction

• In Event: Cognitive Science Goes to College: Scaling Up What We Know About Learning and Instruction

Abstract

Purpose
The objective of this presentation is to suggest the use of a strategy drawn from evidence-based medicine to support the development and testing of culturally appropriate evidence-based instruction for diverse student populations. Examples of instructional research and development efforts will be presented to illustrate and provide evidence for the approach, including other papers in this symposium as well as research underway in a number of national centers.

Perspective, Techniques and Evidence
R. E. Clark and Estes (2008) drew on evidence-based medicine to argue that the active ingredients of effective instruction are not obvious and are often confused with inert surface or contextual features of instructional elements. This common error has, for example, led many educators (including many researchers) to wrongly assume that different media (e.g. computers, books, smart phones) result in different learning benefits for different students.

The active ingredients approach uses analytical strategies based on four questions:

1) Who has what learning problem or challenge?
There are at least three different categories of problems that may be involved in any learning challenge: cognitive processing, motivation to learn and access to learning materials and media. Each type of challenge connects with a different body of research and theory.

2) What evidence exists from well-designed experiments about treatments and variables that have a positive influence on student learning challenges?
While instruction requires a complex series of decisions about many factors, we adopt the view of R. C. Clark and Mayer (2008) that the place to begin the search is with well designed experiments where all conditions are held constant except for one variable as the desired foundation for evidence-based work. All too often however, many different variables seem to have similar results and similar variables can have different results.

3) What is the active ingredient found in all treatments that have a positive effect on the problem in experiments?
When different treatments have the same effect on learning or motivation to learn and/or similar treatments have different effects an examination of the operational definitions of treatments can often identify shared active ingredients.

4) How can we translate and contextualize the active ingredient so that it will be compatible with the individual and cultural differences in the setting(s) where it will be used?
A cultural analysis strategy focused on the context and setting where the instruction will be delivered will be described and examples provided. The goal is to translate the active ingredients identified in step three so that they are embedded in instructional presentations that are compatible with the expectations and values of students.

Scholarly significance
Evidence-based instruction has been difficult to implement for a variety of reasons including conflicts in the research base available to make instructional decisions. The active ingredients approach uses these conflicts to tease out the learning active elements of treatments and makes them available for instructional design and delivery for diverse tasks, settings and student populations.

Author

• Richard E. Clark, University of Southern California