Evidence-Informed Learning Design summary

Before we dive into actionable techniques however, let’s begin with taking a look at how to judge sources when it comes to learning. After all, it’s likely this blink is not going to be the last material on learning experience design you’ll encounter. Okay. Let’s dig in.

Say you’re tasked with creating a new learning design experience for your team. The goal is to prepare them for a new project which involves a lot of new information. You start coming up with ideas, but eventually hit a roadblock – you need some inspiration. Googling yields countless ideas, and most seem like they could provide useful inspiration for you to continue.

But some sources are better than others. When picking out studies or articles on learning, you need to adopt a prejudiced approach. Because not all materials are created equally. 

So, what should you do? It’s all about adopting an evidence-based approach when courting materials. The first part of doing this involves avoiding the huge amount of myths surrounding learning. And as we’ll see shortly, there are a number of long-held assumptions about learning that are demonstrably false.

Take the “learning styles” myth, for example. It’s been around for a long time and is still widely believed to be true, no matter what the science says. The myth is, of course, that different people learn in different ways – some prefer reading, and others prefer listening to podcasts or watching videos. In the context of learning experience design, this myth often leads educators to providing parallel materials for different groups. This leads to spiraling costs for such learning experiences.

The learning styles myth is a great example of something that feels intuitively right while being completely wrong. So, if you’re considering using something “intuitively” right similar to learning styles, it’s best to take a moment to go beyond your intuition – and analyze your thinking process. In the case of learning styles, you might realize that what people want isn’t always good for them. Sure, most of us want to eat sugary or fatty food, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for us. It’s the same with learning styles. And multiple studies have shown that it either has no effect or even negative effects on learning outcomes.

Learning how to identify myths will put you on the right track to adopting an evidence-based approach for designing learning experiences. But it’s only one side of the coin. The other is being able to distinguish great learning materials from average ones.

Doing so doesn’t mean spending hours trawling through the sources of academic articles. It’s often the case that the language of what you’re reading will give you a pretty good idea. Let’s say you discover an article that claims to have discovered an effective new method to increase learning retention. The first thing you should do is check if it relies too much on vague or emotional language, both of which are red flags for potentially shoddy information. Also be wary if the author is excessively hyping up this new learning method before actually getting to explaining the method itself. The best resources rely on the power of their arguments without needing extra hype.

If the author’s language is sound and there’s no obvious hype, you can still do a bit of digging. For example, you can check the quality of the individual sources the article references. Are the sources published, preferably in peer-reviewed journals? Do the publishers of the journals have any obvious links to particular philosophies or products? These sorts of indicators will give you a solid idea whether the article is legit or not. If it passes these quick litmus tests, then the article’s findings are ready to be implemented into the next learning experience you’re designing.