Evidence-based learning: Worth a look, even if you’re a sceptic

That said, I did like Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Not as a rigid teaching framework, but as an occasional and genuinely enjoyable way to give students some agency, letting them choose how they wanted to engage with a topic, or how they wanted to show what they’d learned. I wasn’t trying to “teach to their intelligence types.” I just thought it was fun to explore them, and my students did too.

So when evidence-based learning came along later in my career, my old scepticism re-surfaced fairly quickly. That’s not to say I dismissed it outright. I just wasn’t ready to accept it in one fell swoop. And to be honest, I still have reservations about parts of it. But there’s no point discarding a whole idea just because you disagree with some of it, and any framework that gets teachers talking and thinking about their practice is doing something worthwhile. So let’s give it a fair hearing.

What actually is it?

Evidence-based learning is the idea that teaching decisions should be informed by research into how people actually learn, rather than habit, tradition, or whatever happened to work for us when we were students. Over the past few decades, researchers have built up a body of findings around memory, attention, and what helps knowledge stick — and a number of the strategies that have come out of that work will already be familiar to you from your training. Things like:

• Retrieval practice — regularly asking students to recall information rather than just re-presenting it to them
• Spaced practice — revisiting topics across several lessons rather than covering them once and moving on
• Formative assessment — frequent, low-stakes checks for understanding that help you adjust your teaching in the moment
• Explicit feedback — specific, timely responses to student work that tell them exactly what to do differently
• Metacognition — helping students think about how they learn, not just what they are learning

You’ve probably heard most of these already. And that’s kind of the point — a lot of evidence-based practice turns out to be a more structured way of describing things good teachers have always done.

Retrieval practice is something most experienced teachers do intuitively. The research has given it a name and confirmed what good teaching instinct already knew: being asked to remember something is itself part of learning it. The same goes for feedback. Timely, specific, useful feedback matters. That’s hardly a revelation, but it’s good to have it confirmed. And one thing I really do like, and which was new to me, is the idea of metacognition; explicitly bringing students into the understanding of how they learn best.

But there are parts which really don’t sit well with me. There’s an idea called ‘cold calling’. You deliberately pick a student who hasn’t volunteered, put them on the spot, and then let them struggle or get something wrong in front of the class. The thinking behind it is rooted in retrieval practice: the effort of trying to recall something, even unsuccessfully, strengthens memory. But cold calling takes that a step further, potentially adding distress or humiliation into the equation as an added incentive to learn. 

I’ve sat in a session where this was presented as simple good practice, to be used universally. I wonder how much thought the person presenting this idea gave to the students they were responsible for. My guess was that it was a while since they had been in a real classroom. My immediate thought was: what about the student with anxiety who dreads being singled out? The one who’s already convinced they’re no good at this subject? The one who had a difficult morning before they even walked through the door? Getting something wrong in private is part of learning. Getting it wrong publicly, without warning, in front of your peers, is something else entirely. I would hope that anyone reading this blog cares about the mental wellbeing of their students at least as much as they care about what they learn. I personally don’t believe those two things should ever be in competition.

Most educational research is conducted in controlled settings that look nothing like the average school day. A researcher can tell you what worked somewhere, with some students, under certain conditions. But they can’t tell you what will work here, today, with your particular group of students. That gap matters, and it’s why professional judgement will always be part of the picture, no matter how good the research is.

So how can we make use of this? Maybe think of the research less as a set of instructions and more as a set of interesting prompts. Does retrieval practice resonate with how you already work? You could try being more deliberate about it — low-stakes quizzes, think-pair-share, asking students to jot down what they remember before you revisit a topic. Does the evidence on feedback make you want to rethink how you respond to student work? Worth exploring. But if something doesn’t fit your context, your students, or your values as a teacher, you’re not obliged to use it.

The thing about evidence-based learning — and about any framework for thinking about teaching — is that engaging with it at all is probably the point. The teachers I’ve most admired over the years haven’t been the ones who followed every new approach faithfully. They’ve been the ones who kept asking questions, stayed curious, and never stopped reflecting on what they were doing and why.

If evidence-based learning does nothing more than prompt that kind of reflection, it’s already done something useful. So let’s look at it with open minds, and with our own experience firmly in the room.

What do you think? What practices resonate with you? Are there any you want to know more about? Drop me a note here.