Dear Colleagues,
I am wondering if any of you read the article by Benjamin Ruark " ARDDIE is IN, ADDIE is OUT" It concerned Evidence Based Practice, which is very popular in the medical field. I looked at ASTD literature search and found nothing.
Does anyone have an idea of it practicability in the training field? I know in Education it is being used to evaluate teaching interventions.
For example, doing a literature search to find how a particular research study corresponds to a current training program would prove difficult with the current literature for training.
I have read about Experimenal/Control groups as being the "gold standard" for a study. I am not sure how practical this can be on a ongoing basis in an organization.
I can send an article with the pro/cons of EDP and some others for those interested.


Please read the article and respond to my comment
Louis A. Quagliana
Munroe Regional Medical Center
352-402-5108

This field as Ruark approaches it is quite limited. I'm very familiar with EBM (one of my clients focuses on that), have some distant exposure to evidence-based education, and am working on a book for ASTD in which this is part of the content.

1. Ruark refers to EBP or "practice." I know of no-one else who uses that term. For instance, Sutton and Pfeffer have written extensively on the concept of "evidence-based management" which is really about making organizational and people decisions based on data, not biases or theories. A key element of Senge's Fifth Discipline is on systems thinking. Systems thinking isn't EDP as Ruark explains it but it's very much similar to Evid-based Medicine and Evid-based Management. It deals with objectivity, looking for disconfirming data, not operating on hunches or simplistic theories of the world. In short, there has been a great deal written in the WLP field around this but not labeled as EBP or as Ruark describes it.

2. Ruark, based on what I've read of his position on EBP, focuses on a variation of research design (ie: control groups, etc.). I think that's not only the wrong way to appeal to managers and executives but it misses the larger issues here. It's not that organizations don't use the scientific method enough when making decisions, it's that they rarely use data (or the data is anecdotal or it's hand-picked to justify a conclusion made prior to the work). In which case, simply doing more research is not likely to be helpful.

3. The application to ADDIE is weak I feel. ADDIE is a research driven approach--data that is generated by the needs assessment and then the "E" at the end--evaluation. The problem with ADDIE isn't the lack of data, lack of research or even lack of a control group (organizations are the easiest places to find control groups--we have shift workers, we never train everyone at once). The problem with ADDIE isn't a lack of evidence. It's a lack of perspective. ADDIE assumes the problem is a lack of knowledge or skill and designs a solution to deal with that. That is why an HPI approach works better. It does not assume that knowledge or skills are the basis of the problem.

Ultimately, HPI/HPT/Performance Consulting as practiced is the epitome of evidence-based management. It is objective, it is data driven.

quote:

The problem with ADDIE isn't a lack of evidence. It's a lack of perspective.

Great point! This lack of perspective is yet another reason that there should be some formal education/experience/qualifications to enter the field of training.