Teaching Evidence-Based Management
The show is dedicated to sharing challenges, techniques, experiences and best practice when teaching evidence-based management to others (from under graduates through to executives). Hosted by CEBMa Fellow and 20 year change management veteran Karen Plum, each episode features experts in the field who have practical experience of teaching evidence-based management and bringing it to life!
Teaching Evidence-Based Management
Teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates - part 1
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Ever wonder how we can elevate the management process with a more evidence-based approach? The conversation provides tangible strategies to enhance management teaching at the undergraduate level, with guests sharing their rich insights on the challenges and benefits of teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates. We dive into the importance of critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and bridging the gap between research and practice.
The second half of our conversation draws a line from the classroom to the real world of human resource management. Our guests peel back the layers of teaching evidence-based consulting, revealing the blend of theory, evidence, and practical application involved. This episode has a rich mix of academia and real-world application to a provide fresh perspective on teaching evidence-based management.
Host:
Karen Plum
Guests:
- Brigitte Kroon, Associate Professor of Human Resource Studies, Tilburg University, Netherlands
- Christina Rader, Associate Professor with Tenure, Department of Economics and Business at Colorado College, Colorado, USA
- David Peterson, Associate Professor of Management, James Madison University, Virginia, USA
- Denise Rousseau, H J Heinz University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, USA
- Jeroen Stouten, Professor of Organizational Psychology, KU Leuven, Belgium & CEBMa Scientific Director
Mentions:
Center for Evidence-Based Management
CEBMa Teachers Network
CEBMa’s Online Course Modules
Teaching Evidence-Based Management to Undergraduates
Karen PlumHello and welcome to the Teaching Evidence-Based Management podcast . This time we're looking at teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates , and this is a two-part episode , so be sure to catch the next episode so you hear all the discussion . If you don't already teach evidence-based management to undergraduate students , you might be wondering why other courses do this . After all , undergrads have little to no relevant work experience , and so they can't relate to evidence-based management in the way that exec students or experienced managers would . Perhaps they're not even aware that there's a problem to tackle , and by that I mean that there are plenty of managers out there making important business-critical decisions based solely on their personal experience and what their gut tells them . Is this something we even want to tell undergrads about ? Won't we demoralise them , thinking that the world of work is dysfunctional , when they were hoping to learn , develop and make a difference ? How do we sell evidence-based management to them under these circumstances ? Another issue is that they aren't in the same position as practicing managers who can put what they learn into practice at work - one of the prerequisites for learning transfer - so they can master their evidence-based management skills . All of that said , today's undergrads are our future . They have a lot of expectations and aspirations . They want to make a difference in the world and in the workplace , and it seems to me that evidence-based management is a vital skill that they can use to start to fix and redefine how organizations operate .
Karen PlumI'm Karen Plum , a student of evidence-based management myself , albeit at the other end of the spectrum from the undergraduates , and I'm interested to know - is teaching evidence-based management to undergrads a fool's errand or a really smart idea ? And how do you go about it ? How do you tackle the challenges ? What do they get out of it ? To help me explore , I'm talking to five experts , three from the US and two from Europe , and I'm going to let them introduce themselves . You can also find their details in our show notes . Here we go .
Christina RaderHi Christina Rader . I'm at Colorado College in our Department of Economics and Business .
Karen PlumAnd how long have you been teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates ? Oh , let's say five years . Okay , all right . Does that make you a veteran ? Does that make her a veteran , Denise ?
Denise RousseauAbsolutely . She's one of our stars .
Karen PlumExcellent , so , Denise .
Denise RousseauI'm Denise Rousseau , a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in public policy and management , and I do workshops for undergraduates to help teachers know how to teach them and develop their own approaches .
David PetersonYeah , I'm an Associate Professor of Management at James Madison University and I've been teaching evidence-based management to undergrads, I think this is my seventh year . Seventh or eighth year started in 2016 .
Karen PlumSo Brigitte .
Brigitte KroonSo I'm Brigitte Kroon . I work in Tilburg University as an Associate Professor of Human Research studies and I am the Academic Director of the Bachelor of People Management and Personeelwetenschappen , which is Dutch for people management , and I've been teaching and making sure that students get the hang of evidence-based management maybe also six years .
Jeroen StoutenJeroen Stouten , Professor at KU Leuven , the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences .
Karen PlumAnd Scientific Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Management ?
Jeroen StoutenOh yeah , that too , that's right .
Karen PlumOh yeah , that too in my spare time ! Excellent , right , okay , so let's get on with my first question . I mean , obviously there are challenges in teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates and we'll get to those as we go through the discussion . But why include evidence-based management in your courses ? What's the purpose or what do you expect the students to get out of studying this approach ? David , can you kick us off ?
David PetersonOh boy . I think this is one of the most important things to do for these undergraduates . It's , in my view , in my experience , it's what gives them the ability to think and solve problems . They get information like conflict is bad for teams , or maybe it's good for teams sometimes , but that's about the level of detail that they get from traditional textbooks and traditional classes and that doesn't really allow them to diagnose more detailed problems with conflict in their teams or make decisions about what they should do in response to that .
David PetersonSo my view is , this is the thing that unlocked all of the other classes for them . So we have a required undergraduate class for all of our management majors , that is , it's an evidence-based management class , and I was asking my students hey , what do you get from this ? And some of them said you know , this has changed the way that I look at all of my other classes . Now I go to human resource management , I go to strategy , I go to these other classes and now I'm thinking about the material differently , and that's why I think we should be doing this to get them to think and problem solve differently .
Karen PlumThere was a lot of enthusiastic nodding as you were saying that , and I guess it's one of the things that's really going to help students to think . Anybody else have anything to add to what David said ?
Brigitte KroonYeah , if I may . So I have two reasons why I include it in our program . So first is the research practice gap and that it's still out there and that I have seen it in my own eyes when I was working as an HR practitioner , so I was annoyed by that . And the other reason is that students often told me that they feel that in university they learn nothing practical . There's nothing that they learn in university that they will use in practice . So when combining those two things , led me to no other conclusion that we should teach evidence- based management to students, yes . Starting working from problems, problems that organizations face , problems that teams face and trying to identify what the problem is, working from there , what we know from the research and what we know from the local context to yeah , to improve it .
Karen PlumRight , that's got to hurt , hasn't it ? When students say they learn nothing practical .
Brigitte KroonYeah , especially we make them go through like a series of four stats courses that they find particularly annoying .
Karen PlumKids eh ? ! So David mentioned that this was a standalone course or module on evidence- based management . What other sorts of courses does evidence- based management feature in ? Does it feature as part of a course in a different subject, Christina ?
Christina RaderYes , I'll share . We do not have a management program . We have a tiny major there's now four business faculty , and so the students get one management course in their entire degree , and so I have made evidence- based management about half of the management course . That's the way to learn management - is using evidence- based management , and so you're teaching a skill . Absolutely yeah , and I think to what everyone else has said . Teaching management from an evidence- based management approach helps it become really relevant for the students because they have to occupy the space of the manager . It's no longer all of these textbook things they have to learn . They're actually faced with a problem . How do we solve it ? And go from kind of grasping at straws or not knowing how to approach something to having a methodical approach that they know they can follow to solve the problem .
Denise RousseauI think one of the important threads between David and Brigitte and Christina is the idea that young students - undergraduates typically are relatively young - is that they haven't the kind of work experience that's told them a way you ought to act in a workplace or as a manager . They're a little bit more tabular rasa with regard to, well how do people make decisions ? How do you think about a problem ? So , before they've seen models that are based more on authority you know I have experience, listen to me or reactive approaches to problems , they learn something more systematic - question asking and oh , there's multiple sources of evidence maybe that I could bear on the issue . And because they don't have often any pre existing beliefs about how a problem should be solved , they're open to learning new things and actually even applying them in their personal lives at the time we're teaching , which is another fascinating aspect of teaching people who haven't yet worked but who really want to apply the skills they acquire .
Karen PlumYeah, and I think in organizations we don't help , do we ? Because people arrive and we don't teach them even the fundamentals of what organizational culture looks like and what is expected of people , and the best guide they have , I suppose , is the experience that they had at university , but they don't track .
Teaching Evidence-Based Management to Undergraduates
David PetersonI wanted to add on to what Denise was saying there with the lack of experience . I think that presents kind of this double problem for them , where , one , when we're teaching them these concepts where , hey , you need to get evidence from these sources you need to get evidence in the first place and which is oftentimes a novel concept, they don't have concrete experiences to anchor those two . You know , compare that with my MBA students who have all worked for a number of years . They come in , they go , oh yeah , I can see why I need that , because I've had that problem, right . W ith these undergrads come in and they don't have that experience where they realize , oh , I can see why that's, why that's important .
David PetersonAnd then also we're asking them to you know , talk about the scientist practitioner gap , which is much bigger in management than any other field, we're asking them to be pioneers in taking evidence- based decision making out into the organizations where they won't have, they're unlikely to have a mentor or someone else that they can follow . So they have the problem of learning without concrete experiences, we need to give that to them . But then they also get out and they need a framework that they can come in as new people introduce that , and I think the Center for Evidence-Based Management , with the model , the modules there , gives such a concrete framework for them to use . I have gotten more comments from past students about my evidence- based decision making class , about , hey , this is this is helping me . You know , five , six years later , this is still what's relevant . This changed the way that I , that I do things, than any other class that I've ever taught .
Karen PlumYeah , there's your practical experience , isn't it coming into the real world ? But it strikes me that for these people who are looking forward I mean , I don't mean looking forward , but you know , in their future they will be joining the workforce , the workplace , and we're essentially dispiriting them by telling them hey , you know , people aren't very good at making decisions and organizations make really bad decisions for all sorts of political or organizational or personal reasons . Do they find it difficult to get their heads around the fact that organizations are dysfunctional ? Jeroen , can you weigh in on that one ?
Jeroen StoutenYeah , I think that's a difficult one for them because that is something they didn't realize . That's something we come across during the internships a lot , that they follow the mentor and find it hard to link back to what they've they've learned throughout the previous years . But for them it's sort of discomforting that they they sort of notice that what is happening out there isn't quite consistent what they're learning in their courses . So that that's definitely true .
Christina RaderI'm at a liberal arts institution and our major is an interdisciplinary major and my students come in already criticizing the world . I recognize this and so I honestly find for some of them it's hard because it's like , oh wait , here's one more thing I have to criticize . But for many of them I think they find it empowering because they're seeing the skills that they're getting to make the difference in the world that they want to make . And also , just coming from a liberal arts background , sometimes they aren't sure where they're going to fit in the working world and this helps them see how their liberal arts skills are so closely aligned with evidence- based management and how that will make them such a valuable contributor at their workplace .
Karen PlumThere's lots to contribute , isn't there ? But lots of challenges in contributing it , given that the people you're trying to contribute amongst have had a lifetime of , you know , not being challenged or doing things the way they thought was the right way to do . But let's move on to talk about how you go about covering evidence- based management with undergraduates . I know , Christina , because we talked for the evidence- based management podcast , that we did for the online course , that you have a particular approach here . Do you want to take us through it ?
Christina RaderSure . So the students in our class do projects for, a consulting project for a client , so typically either a nonprofit , or more and more we've been doing consulting for different arms of the college , so for our HR department , and I get them on pretty large teams , so teams of eight students , and they end up becoming experts in one form of evidence and how to acquire, ap praise , etc . So we start from the beginning . I find the clients in advance , but we do not nail down the question or the problem perfectly, because I want the students to come in at the ask level of the engagement .
Karen PlumSo you're asking - do you have a problem that that my students could help you fix ?
Christina RaderSo yeah , so I usually have it to where I have looked to see, do they have a problem where I think there's likely to be some scientific evidence ? Because I want them to have success in finding scientific evidence and have something to talk about , as opposed to oh , there's nothing . B ut the exact nature of it - s o , for example , our HR department was thinking about revising the performance appraisal process as an example , and so that was as in depth as I got with the client before we brought the students in . So , for example , we've done the performance appraisal process , one about generations of workers . So what do different generations want ? And learning , even just to question the assumptions there, that generations want different things , like that was hard to get there .
Christina RaderI find clients; get the students matched with a client; and by the third day of class they're meeting with their client . So there we're going fast . That's , that's part of it too . So , oh , and , by the way , we teach on a different format where we have three hour classes . So by the third three hour class they're meeting with their client and have done the ask , the intro . So it's the modules paired with meeting with the client . So everything we do with the modules we're always looking toward - you do the module , do the quiz and then say how does this apply to my client ? How will I take the next steps for my client ? So , meeting with your client by the third class and then by the fifth class , you have your problem statement and you've come back to the client saying here's what we're working on .
Christina RaderAnd then the way we do it is everybody has to find some scientific evidence , because everyone needs to have that experience . But then one set of the team will be responsible for writing up the CAT , so one sub team and another sub team will be responsible for finding stakeholder evidence and another sub team will be responsible for another form of evidence . The other thing that we do is we try to be realistic about the fact they're not going to have time to collect all the evidence because we also have an express schedule . So we teach the whole class in three and a half weeks . So it's three hours a day , five days a week , three and a half weeks .
Christina RaderBut even over the course of a semester it could be hard to have time to actually acquire all the evidence , and so what I have them do is make a plan for how they would acquire other forms of evidence , because often organizational facts can be hard to come by on such a short timeframe or they just don't even know yet how to do that because they don't have the experience . So they'll make a plan and then put together a proposal or a presentation for their client , both a write up and a presentation . A lot of writing , so , but one of the big things that we work on a lot is that the recommendations must come from the evidence , which you know they've been learning all along , but it's just so easy for things to slip in . You know they got the sense that the client liked this idea .
Karen PlumYeah , yeah , so they're starting to use their intuition and their gut feeling and all the other things that we all use .
Christina RaderYeah , and so , and I think , just for them , even learning how to form recommendations is really important , learning that you're not going to come tell your client often, "you should do this , but more often "you should consider this thing that we found , and here's a scale you could use to measure that" or those sorts of things . I've had to work with them , the students . Sometimes we end up with two levels of recommendations - the evidence-based ones and then the ones that are saying these aren't recommendations, but here are the things that we have no evidence for that you might want to look into because someone seemed interested in it , but that's a whole other project that you could hire us or, so, yeah .
Karen PlumGreat , great - really interesting . So, does anybody do anything different ?
Jeroen StoutenI think our program is a little different because we're a work and organizational psychology program and we gradually built the different pieces of evidence over the years . So in one course they'll start with scientific evidence and then expertise , then stakeholders and data and then the internship all comes together , so full cycle . We take a bit more time . I see some comparisons with what Christina is doing and the scientific evidence we also work with a question from practice from HR managers , but it's videotaped .
Jeroen StoutenBut it's kind of interesting because we asked the managers to ask a question about a particular topic . So we gave them a topic we wanted them to ask a question about and it always ends up in a very different question than the one we would originally ask them to pose . So either it's more complicated , it has more sub dimensions or a very long list of outcomes that they just added for themselves, basically . So this is a good exercise for students already to deepen up the question, what is the real question here ? So that is one of the first things that they would do . Later on and this taps on what Christina is doing they would actually work with a client on an actual problem , but this is a course that lasts for a full year , so they would be able to do an intervention and test the intervention there as well . There's definitely similarities , but I think we have a bit more time to gradually build up the skill set .
Karen PlumYes . Brigitte , what about you ?
Brigitte KroonYeah , we also have a three-year staged process to getting students to work in an evidence-based way . We start in year one maybe that's interesting . We have a course with , I would say , about 400-500 students and we let them do a small project on evidence-based management consulting . We send them in groups of five or six to their parents' companies , their relatives , whoever, with the question , is there a problem with people in your organization ? I've been running this course for how long have you got ? Yes , exactly .
Brigitte KroonIt never happened to me that there's an organization saying , no , we don't have problems at all, it's really interesting !
Karen PlumIt's all fine !
Brigitte KroonFrom there on , we guide them quite strictly to come up with a clear outcome - so what does the company want to improve; in what domain of HR practice is it ? Could you find the potential solution
Teaching Evidence-Based Consulting in HR
Brigitte Kroon? Then we start working from there with theory , with evidence . Remember , these are freshmen , so we need to really take them by the hand and showing them where to look for evidence . But we also send them back to the organization to collect evidence from the organization . So they have to prepare interviews with stakeholders or see if they can get some employee satisfaction survey that's lying about there . It's very minimal , but it just gets a taste for what it is when we talk about evidence-based consulting . The fun thing is I've written this book about evidence-based human resource management and it covers a lot of theories . They actually use the book and it proves that students that are writing their master thesis, they still cite me as the author of Social Exchange Theory , which is funny !
Karen PlumYou'll take that right ? !
Brigitte KroonExactly that was challenge one that they are not afraid to use theories as a starting point to find evidence . Then in year two we have a course that's called evidence-based consulting and there we introduce them to the modules . By then they've already had these four stats courses and research methods course , so they have all this knowledge . So when you start talking about using need analysis , they are actually capable of reading them and using them . What we do in that course is we work together with the consulting company Deloitte in the past years and they have created a huge business case based on their own experience . It's a little bit like what Christina says , but it's more theoretical . They give the students a lot of information . They present it like , hey , we are the consultants and you are going to help us . So there's a little bit of stress to the students that they have to work well because this is a company where they will probably like to work in the future . Then they collect their evidence , do their CATs , do their things , and then they have to pitch their advice to Deloitte in the end . Then we are really challenging them also , for example , if they come up with these wonderful interventions that are completely correct according to the theory , and then we just ask okay , what are the costs ? That's also a good check .
Brigitte KroonThen in third year after they, so they had this introduction and the skills course they can opt for doing an internship and part of the internship is doing an evidence-based consulting project . So they have to again go to the company , ask do you have a problem with people ? Okay , where is it ? And then of course , it needs to be full on and that is supervised . So that's what we do with undergrads . What might be interesting is that we also do a similar course for international business administration and that's more the Christina cases . Just one course , but human research management . We made a course about evidence-based human research management and we also give them cases , three in total, b ecause it's a shorter term course . Then we created the cases ourselves and it also works really, really nicely .
Karen PlumSo , David , I'm keen to hear from you . I saw your eyes widen when Christina was talking about the three week course .
David PetersonYeah , that was - I struggle to fit all the material into 14 weeks , and so I'm very impressed at that . And then my eyes with Jeroen and Brigitte as well , in jealousy , because I want to take my semester- long course and make it, I don't know, I'd like to make it five , six years long , but they won't let me do that . They say the students have to get out of there faster , but I love that idea of making it multiple years . So I'm kind of in the middle there . My students are juniors and seniors . They've completed some basic management courses and we have a 14 week , very traditional semester , at least in terms of the US , and I teach two days a week , hour and 15 minute classes , and so I stick very closely to the OLI modules, the 15 modules, there . They do roughly one a week , and I've been doing that ever since that was launched .
David PetersonBefore that, boy , this class looked so different . Another professor and I were asked to create it from scratch in 2016 and we didn't have the benefit of that book , and so at one point , our students had to buy a stats book and they were learning . It was very heavy in analysis . Another time , we were very heavy in kind of the project , like some of the others are doing and so once the book came out I kind of threw all of that , said , okay , I'm doing this and it's actually I can look at my teaching evals and see it kind of jump up when that happened because there was this nice structure and framework .
David PetersonBut what I focus on is a couple of things . One I focus on the scientific evidence because they're not getting that anywhere else and they're getting a little bit of , you know , stakeholder analysis in other classes . Some of the other things are a little bit more familiar . They've got some analytics but they don't get the scientific stuff . So I take that and break that out . We spend about four or five weeks just on the scientific evidence and I make them do a rapid evidence assessment . And over the years I started with okay , you're gonna do rapid evidence assessment , go for it . You know , here's the book , go for it . And then I realized oh wait , the lack of experience and there's a lot of things I need to fill in t he gap on that made sense to me, but didn't make sense for them .
David PetersonBut as an aside , going through the scientific evidence information in this book has completely transformed the way I do my own research and I use the search filters . I have them in my own Word document and it is completely and , I think , for the better enhanced my own research . So I make the students , I give them a list of topics that I've curated to make sure that there's at least two meta-analyses for each of the topics . So it's things like in diversity , or some of it is entrepreneurship , but a lot of HR things , a lot of organizational behavior things , and I had this list of topics that , like I said , I curated to make sure there was at least two meta-analyses, if they do their searches right , that would come up in their results and then they have to find a popular press article , which is they take that topic , put it into Google News and anything there .
David PetersonThey need to find an article that either makes an explicit claim or implies some sort of a claim . So it could be a company that says hey , we do this . And I have one article where there's a CEO saying CEO of a kind of newer online gaming company , and they say we do this because it enhances this . Perfect , there's a claim , you have an intervention and an outcome that the CEO is saying, tying these two things together . So I have the students . I say , find one of those or one of those kind of generic online articles that says five things that you should do to enhance your work performance or something . And so they find one of these , and then we spent some time extracting the claim from that . We use the PICOC framework Okay , what's the intervention , what's the outcome , what's the context ? And then we transition that into the scientific evidence . So they have to figure out, okay , the CEO or whoever the author is in the article .
David PetersonThey're saying burnout , but what do scientists call that ? Well , burnout's easy , because scientists just call it burnout . But if they get into things like flex time , we have so many terms as scientists for what do we call it flex time , flexible working hours , flexible schedule . And so I feel bad for the students that picked that one at first , because they're gonna have a much harder time translating what that is , and I found that's one of the key points .
David PetersonThe students don't know how to translate lay terms or even industry terms to scientific terms , and we don't help them with that . With the way that we throw around scientific terms , and if you've ever put the key terms out of an article at the last as an afterthought , we're not helping them . So they have to do that . They have to find evidence . I used to make them find a lot more , but now I'd say at least one meta analysis and one other article it can be another meta analysis or something and they go through the critical appraisal . They use the critical appraisal app, the CAT manager app that's available and that walks them through really nicely , and they have to find effect sizes and write up this rapid evidence assessment .
David PetersonAnd a couple of the things that I realized after years of doing this that I've seen them really struggle with . One was understanding this kind of X arrow Y relationship that we have something that we're saying causes something else . And so I literally the entire semester and drawing X arrow Y on the board and they learn to interpret their entire world through X and Y and we try to tie it back to . You know , if you have cologne on , that's your X , your outcome is likelihood of getting a date or something , or you know . So we try to tie everything in their world to Xs and Ys and then we could say , okay , effect sizes tell us something about the arrow . They'll say that's positive or negative . Small , medium , large . They call it French fries and that somehow helps them understand the small , medium , large . So I realized the logic models . They have a really hard time understanding what that is . And so Xs and Ys , I just harp onto that and we draw everything out on the board, on paper, Xs and Ys and I've got some worksheets that help walk them through . I've got three worksheets that walk them through the different steps of doing a rapid evidence assessment .
David PetersonThe other thing that I found that they really struggled with , that again was kind of I couldn't pick up what the problem was until a few years in, was logical thinking . You know I think it was Christina or Brigitte saying you know how do we get them to tie the recommendations to actual evidence instead of just the intuition ? That comes much more easily and that really surprised me . That in hindsight it doesn't , but it surprised me that they couldn't , even after finding the evidence they would give recommendations that were completely detached . I thought what's going on ?
David PetersonSo I found there's something that's used in scientific reasoning in primary school education which is claim evidence reasoning , which teaches students to have a scientific claim and find evidence for it and tie those two things together with reasoning . And there's all kinds of videos and frameworks for teachers on using claim evidence reasoning . But I really want to give them a whole course on formal Aristotelian , symbolic logic . modus ponens , modus tollens , if this, then that , because that is what they weren't able to do - to tie , even if they have evidence , say , okay , this claim here is tied to this evidence . And here's the reason . So to help solidify that I give them a quiz about every week from the modules .
David PetersonBut I use those for points , which is kind of hard because there's a lot of subjectivity in that . So what we do is we take the quiz , they're closed book , take the quiz , and then we have a class CER after , where they get to argue points back using claim evidence reasoning . So they say I claim that C should also be a correct option . It's okay , that's a claim . What's your evidence for that ? Well , in the book it says this and okay , so what's the reasoning that ties that together ? And so after a while they kind of pick up on it and I coach them along the way , trying to close that gap . So the X and Y logic models and trying to diagram things that way and the formal logic reasoning are two pieces that I see as glue to help tie everything together .
Karen PlumSo there are many different ways to approach the teaching of evidence-based management to undergraduates and , as you heard , there's a wealth of learning they can accumulate even from the shortest exposure to the methodology . All the teachers make use of CEBMa's online modules and the book that accompanies them , and this provides material for the students to go back to . There are details about the course on the CEBMa website , cebma . org - h ead to the Services page . Certainly , the methodology and framework that the course teaches has transformed not only the way students approach this and other subjects , but the way the teachers do their own research .
Karen PlumI've heard that some teachers have stopped teaching evidence-based management to undergraduates because they can't meet the standards that they would expect of an evidence-based management practitioner . Given their lack of experience and opportunities to practice , maybe that's not too surprising . Perhaps we have to think about what we can reasonably expect from them and focus on the learning , not the performance of specific tasks . Maybe it's OK to make mistakes , to draw incorrect conclusions , to give advice not based on the evidence , but to learn from those mistakes . Perhaps the most important things are that they know there's a wealth of evidence available to enable managers to make better informed decisions and that they have acquired the skill of critical thinking , to ask lots and lots and lots of questions . To question everything , right down to their professors and their textbooks . It's this lack of critical thinking or of not questioning assumptions and claims that leads so many managers to make poor decisions that cost their people and their organizations dearly . So that's it for Part 1 .
Karen PlumIn Part 2 , we'll talk about how to measure the success of the teaching programs and what advice our teachers would give to others who are planning to teach evidence-based management to undergraduates or who are finding it challenging . And there are a few other nuggets they shared along the way . Many thanks to Christina , Brigitte , Denise, Jeroen and David for their time and for sharing their experiences and ideas with me . If you found this episode useful , you can like or follow the show so you get future episodes delivered to your podcast feed . If you're interested in the CEBMa Teacher's Network , head to the website cebma . o rg and go to the Services page where you'll find a link to the Teacher's Network . Thanks so much for listening . See you next time . Goodbye .
