Evidence-Based Practice In Management And Consulting [Enter Course]


This course will introduce students to the basic concepts and skills of evidence-based practice. The course is directly relevant to students who would like to improve the quality and outcome of their decision-making.

Managers and consultants are required to take action based on their decisions, and such decisions may have profound impacts on employees, customers and clients, the organization and society more widely. But how good are such decisions? How can we ensure that managers and consultants get hold of, accurately interpret and make use of the best available evidence in their decision-making?

This course will help students develop the practical skills managers and consultants need to bring evidence-based approaches to their organization. In the process of developing these skills you will also find out a lot about management research.

Additional Course Details

Topics Covered: 
(1) Critical thinking and reasoning; (2) identifying and gathering of the best available evidence; (3) critical appraisal of different forms of evidence; and, (4) applying evidence of different forms to decision-making.
Estimated Time to Complete Course:
To finish the entire course, it will take approximately 10 weeks, assuming you do about one module per week. However, you can also choose to do study modules separately.

In-Depth Description


Module 1: The Basics
What is Evidence-Based Practice? What Counts as Evidence? Why Do We Need Evidence-Based Practice? What Sources of Evidence Should Be Considered? What Sources of Evidence Should Be Considered? Why Do We Have to Critically Appraise Evidence? Why Focus on the ‘Best Available’ Evidence? Common Misconceptions of Evidence-Based Practice. What Is The Evidence For Evidence-Based Practice?
Module 2: Asking (under construction)
What is focused question? Solutions in search for a problem. Surfacing assumptions. What is a causal mechanism? Formulating a searchable question: PICOC.
Module 3: Acquiring Scientific Information (under construction)
Peer reviewed journals. Types of research databases. Search strategies: shotgun, snowball and building blocks. Managing the scientific evidence found. Let the evidence find you!
Module 4: Appraising Scientific Evidence  (under construction)
What is pseudoscience? What is methodological appropriateness? What is internal validity? What is the difference between correlation and causality? What is bias? What is confounding? What is randomization? What is a control group? What are effect sizes? What is external validity? How to read a research article? How to determine the research design? How to determine a study’s methodological quality? How to determine if scientific evidence is trustworthy?
Module 5 : Acquiring and Appraising Experiential Evidence (under construction)
Why are the insights and expertise of experienced professionals is an important source of knowledge? What are the boundaries of human rationality? What are cognitive biases? What are the most common biases? How can you use experiential evidence with due regard for the role played by cognitive biases?
Module 6: Acquiring and Appraising Stakeholder Evidence (under construction)
The influence of values and concerns of stakeholders on decision-making processes. Who are the stakeholders? How can we identify stakeholders’ concerns, values views, needs, areas of common interest, and expectations in a systematic and methodical manner?
Module 7: Acquiring and Appraising Organizational Evidence  (under construction)
What is organizational evidence? Sources of organizational evidence. Forms of organizational evidence. Logical models, organizational context and the political life of business information. Statistics for the terrified: measurement level, sample size, validity, measurement errors, confidence intervals, correlation and regression.
Module 8: Aggregating: weighing and synthesizing the evidence  (under construction)
Module 9: Applying: incorporating the evidence into the decision-making process  (under construction)
Module 10: : evaluating the outcome of the decision taken  (under construction)