Welcome to Academy Empirica
What is this blog about?
With this blog I aim to give practical and evidence-based guidance for teachers in higher education. In the coming years the education sector faces significant disruption due to the development of AI technology. At the same time there is a lot of practice that has not caught up with previous technological developments and research findings. Much (most?) of what happens in university classrooms is not based on evidence of what really works, is poorly thought out and largely done due to tradition and ease. Lectures are one example of this and I will be writing more about this soon.
My name is Thomas Allen, I am an Associate Professor in Economics and have been teaching in the UK higher education system since 2005. In this time I have taught at several different universities across numerous courses and on a range of topics, including microeconomics, economic history, political economy, international trade and many more. I have led projects to design new programmes and have been involved in oversight of assessment practices. Recently I have begun to work in pedagogy research. This blog will naturally take examples from the UK and from the discipline of Economics, but I will explore more widely and am happy to respond to questions and comments from other those working in other countries or disciplines.
The key theme for this blog is to be evidence-based. An enormous literature exists looking at the evidence for effectiveness of educational interventions. This literature has weaknesses and inconsistencies as does any other literature, but in my experience most university teachers are barely aware that it exists, and even if they are, rarely put its findings into practice in a rigorous way. Many ideas sound good in theory, but may not be effective, or are misunderstood, or are not delivered correctly. Take for example this discussion by Ethan Mollick on learning styles.
What do I mean by an ‘effective’ teaching practice? My conception of effective teaching perhaps differs from others, and highlighting this distinction will be another important element of my writing here. I argue that there are three elements to effective teaching practice:
Helping students learn things (in the broadest sense).
This is usually what is meant by effective teaching, if our aim is that students learn things, then using methods that help them do that should be something we aim for.
Improving the quality of the signal.
But that is not the only thing we are doing. Our main other social purpose is to provide an effective signal on which of our students are better than others by setting appropriate assessments and accurately marking this work. Therefore methods, particularly assessment methods, that work well to distinguish the ability levels of our students are also useful.
Convenience and Fun
In my first paragraph I denigrated some teaching as based partly on ease, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Whilst we might be obliged to work hard to help students learn and to help provide an effective signal of quality, we do have other things to do, and if we can achieve similar results with less effort, this is not to be scoffed at. Similarly, the teaching experience can be fun both for the students and the teachers. If we can achieve the same results for points 1 and 2, but have a more enjoyable time whilst doing so, then this also is worth doing.
Take this quote from the paper “To work or Not to Work...That is the Question: Labour Market Decisions in the Classroom” by Garces-Ozanne and Esplin (2010):
“For these reasons, we surmise that although the labour market classroom experiment we present in this paper does not appear to significantly improve students’ understanding and retention, based on a comparison of quiz results, this result is still consistent with the findings of other users of classroom experiments (see, for instance, Yandell, 1999). We also regard this experiment as a valuable tool for engaging students and making them active learners, and an alternative to the monotony of ‘chalk and talk’ in the classroom.”
I have played this game in class. There isn’t strong evidence that it improves comprehension, but it is simply a more fun way to spend an hour in the classroom than a more traditional activity, and so is worth doing for that alone.
This research also highlights the idea of the ‘null hypothesis’. Much work on education interventions and learning strategies finds little in the way of a sustained long-term effect on learning. Our expectation should be that there is no effect. If we do have credible evidence that something really does work then let’s focus on that.
Finally, my posts in this blog will be practical. I will give specific steps for solving specific problems. Very often teaching advice gives some vague principles to work to but leave the question of practical steps unspoken.
I will have a weekly schedule of posts. This will include topical discussion of new developments, deep dives into specific teaching practices, reviews and roundups of other blogs and publications, and more! I hope you will enjoy the blog and find it useful in your practice.
