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

locate articles of possible interest. Thereafter, we have woven EBMgt intorequired courses we were assigned to teach.The students’ first course after orientation is Managing People andOrganizations, which focuses on management and strategic human resourcemanagement content. Importantly, the management course provides opportunitiesfor students to practice skills learned during orientation to access existingliterature on topical issues. This course is an ideal start to the program given thecentrality of the content to managers and because, in many instances, EMBAstudents think they are already well informed about management practices. As aresult, it provides rich grounds to “myth bust” and question assumptions.Throughout this course, students develop skills in focusing research questions,gathering literature related to management and workplace problems, synthesizingand summarizing the results from their searches, integrating other sources ofinformation with the research evidence, and assessing the practical implications ofthe knowledge. Students develop a familiarity and comfort with accessing andreading academic literature and begin the process of using the research evidenceas one source of information to help guide decision-making in practice.Subsequently, students take a Business Research Methods course, whichfurther elaborates upon EBMgt and provides more practice opportunities withrespect to gathering and appraising evidence and ideas. The EBMgt perspectiveseems to make research methods content (reasonably) palatable to pragmaticstudents, while the research methods content provides more of the knowledge andskill required to move students beyond a basic awareness of EBMgt. That is,1004