This session will be streamed online, and the in-person session will take place at the Parnassus campus in the Kalmanovitz Library, 530 Parnassus Ave., CL 221/222. Please register below to receive the streaming link on the day of the event.

Anna T. Cianciolo, PhD, is the Visiting Scholar for the UCSF Educational Skills Scholarly Writing Workshop held on Dec 4-6, 2019. Dr. Cianciolois an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. In addition, she is the Editor-in-Chief of Teaching and Learning in Medicine (TLM), an international, peer-reviewed forum for scholarly investigation of teaching and learning in medical education.

Like evidence-based medicine, evidence-based education seeks to produce sound evidence of impact that can be used to intervene successfully in the future. The mechanics of educational innovations, however, are much less well understood than the physical mechanisms of action of medical treatments, and claims that “it worked” often precede scrutiny of what “it” was. To produce meaningful evidence of educational impact, I will propose as an alternative to the ubiquitous question of “Did it work?” the more fundamental questions of “What was the intended intervention?” and “Did that intervention, in fact, occur?” I will present an approach to analyzing interventions called layered analysis, demonstrating its application to a recent student-led problem-based learning intervention at my home institution. I will highlight how analytical frameworks like layered analysis produce scholarly program evaluations that enhance both theory and practice.

At the end of this presentation attendees will be able to:

Distinguish between observing outcomes and achieving educational impact
Apply the concept of experimental manipulation checks to educational program evaluation
Critically examine published educational program evaluations for meaningful evidence of educational impact