Reflections of Teaching Evidence-Based Management - Center for ...

adapted over time as their learning deepens and they find ways of integratingEBMgt practice with their other learning from the graduate curriculum andelsewhere.The primary learning in this class comes from a series of exercises andprojects for which class time is used to prepare and debrief. These include havingstudents examine popular business books to determine whether they make use ofscientific evidence (not so much) and working in groups to get evidence onpractical questions (e.g., do credit checks improve workforce quality? can virtualteams perform as well as face-to-face teams? how to hire (or reward) goodperformers in a start-up firm? can a hospital acquisition succeed financially whenthe firms have different cultures?). Having a reference librarian advise studentson how to search proves to be very important since most Internet-savvy studentsbelieve themselves to be great searchers (though many have not usedGoogle.Scholar before this class). Repeating the process of asking a question,searching for and interpreting evidence turns out to be critical to what studentslearn. Students are hungry for cases and real-life illustrations of managers usingevidence. John Zanardelli (this volume), a local executive and long-timeevidence-based management practitioner, has related first-hand experience thatstudents enjoy querying. He has followed this up by having his direct reportscome to class to share their experiences, reactions to EBMgt practices, and theirown personal applications of EB approaches like using logic models andsearching for evidence. A variety of EBMgt cases have now been written and, as1000