Testing conventional wisdom
with evidence-based management:
The role of information literacy in a business course
Nick Turner, Amy De Jaeger, Betty Braaksma, and Ganga Dakshinamurti
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
G.I.F.T. Session presented at LOEX of the West - Calgary, Alberta June 11, 2010
by Ganga Dakshinamurti
Outline
•
•
•
•
•
Background:
•
•
•
What is “conventional wisdom”?
What is evidence-based management?
How does information literacy relate to it?
Conventional Wisdom Project:
•
•
•
•
Description of the UM Asper School of Business course
Research questions
Methodology
Findings
Practical implications
Next steps
Questions? Comments?
What is “Conventional Wisdom”?
“A widely held belief on which most people act. This term was invented by John
Kenneth Galbraith, who used it in The Affluent Society (1958) to describe economic
ideas that are familiar, predictable, and therefore accepted by the general public.
Today it is used in any context where public opinion has considerable influence on the
course of events.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton
Mifflin
Testing conventional wisdom
Page 1
What is Evidence-Based Management?
•
•
•
•
•
Face the hard facts, and build a culture in which people are encouraged to tell
the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
Be committed to "fact based" decision making -- which means being
committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions.
Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype -- encourage experimentation
and learning by doing.
Look for the risks and drawbacks in what people recommend -- even the best
medicine has side effects.
Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs, what you have done
in the past, or on uncritical "benchmarking" of what winners do.
From: http://www.evidence-basedmanagement.com
Asking the Unasked Questions
“look beyond the accepted conventional wisdom with a different perspective by asking
the unasked questions.” http://ezarticles.com/?Freakonomics--A-Journey-on-Challenging-Conventional-Wisdom-Through
Economics&id=158617
•
•
•
Fundamental to all IL standards is the idea of evaluating information: asking
the unasked questions
We teach students to evaluate published information for accuracy, currency, origin,
bias, authorship, etc.
What if we tested conventional wisdom the same way?
The Conventional Wisdom project
HRIR 2440 Human Resource Management:
•
introduces undergraduate students to organizational functions such as staffing,
recruiting, training, compensation, the design of work, and health and safety at
work.
Testing conventional wisdom
Page 2
•
•
students can take it with at least one year of university and after admission to the
Business School,
compulsory for BCom students = everyone from 2nd year new students to 4th year
actuarial science students can be taking it
Research Questions
•
•
•
Which conventional wisdom beliefs do practicing managers hold?
How do students test conventional wisdom?
What role does information literacy play in students’ approach to making sense of
the problem and the evidence?
Methodology
•
•
•
•
Students worked in groups of 4-6
Selected an HR issue facing a real life manager
Interviewed the manager
Proceeded through a series of tasks to:
o articulate a research question based on the identified issue
o search out research in the management research literature
o attempt to reconcile the manager’s ‘conventional wisdom’ with the
research literature
Librarians’ contribution
•
•
•
•
Meetings with Course instructor (Nick), Asper School librarian (Ganga), IL
Coordinator (Betty) in the fall, sketching up the project flow chart
Two IL sessions at beginning of course with Ganga and Betty
Nick, Ganga & Betty facilitate peer group check-in/initial report
Ganga assisted students with literature searching and further analysis of their
topics
•
Nick kept librarians appraised of students’ progress to monitor need for individual
assistance
Testing conventional wisdom
Page 3
Findings
•
•
Used a combination of instructor observation and post-project written reflections
from a sub-sample of 91 students.
Gaps were identified in:
o
students’ critical thinking skills
o critical evaluation skills
o literature search & synthesis
o basic understanding of the research process
•
•
Analysis of the reflections suggests that students learned much about the nature of
evidence and reconciling managers’ conventional wisdom with the best evidence
derived from the social science literature.
The importance of information literacy was demonstrated in the observations
that students made about their perceived inability to read and interpret social
scientific research and the pragmatic (often technically-related) difficulties in
accessing high-quality sources of social scientific research.
Practical Implications
•
•
•
management education instructors can introduce similar learning experiences into
their own classroom settings.
practicing managers can use social science research as a tool to enable evidencebased management.
management librarians can introduce information literacy into management classes
or during reference consultations with individual students
Next Steps for Further Discussion & Feedback:
•
•
•
presentation at Management faculty research seminar from the perspective of the
teaching faculty
presentation at Librarians’ reference seminar from the perspective of librarians
incorporating information literacy into curriculum
publishing articles in both Management and Library journals from both of these
perspectives
Testing conventional wisdom
Page 4