PHC5115 Chap.1 Evidence Against Intuition in Teaching
Evidence Against Intuition in Teaching
What the opening session actually removes
The course begins asynchronously, over the National Day break, and it begins by taking something away. Its stated position is that what teachers believe about learning is frequently mistaken and that habit ought to give way to evidence.
The four objectives set for the week are to account for the unreliability of hunch and received wisdom, to hold learning and performance apart, to show how re-reading and marking up a text manufacture a false sense of command, and to set personal goals against evidence.
Three of the four are diagnostic rather than constructive, and that ordering is deliberate: nothing in the remaining five sessions makes sense until the familiar evidence for a teaching decision has been disqualified.
The disqualified evidence is fluency. Reread a passage and it becomes smooth, the words arrive before you have to search for them, and the argument feels obvious.
Nothing in that experience announces that the smoothness comes from having just seen the text rather than from having learned it. Familiarity is a property of recognition; it is a much weaker signal than being able to produce the material when it is gone.
Learning and performance are two different measurements
Performance is how well someone does right now.
Learning is the part that is still there once time has passed, and that carries into a new situation. The two separate immediately after a teaching session and never rejoin, and a learner has direct access only to the first.
This is why a session that ends with fluent answers to closing questions has produced evidence that the explanation was followable and no evidence at all about retention: the closing questions were asked with the vocabulary still active, the worked cases still visible, and no delay in between.
The practical form of this distinction is a short audit you can run on any claim about your own teaching.
Name when the measurement was taken. List the supports that were present then and will be absent later. State the narrower claim the evidence actually supports.
Then name the measurement that would settle the open question, which is almost always an unsupported recall after a gap, compared against the original score rather than reported alone.
Where the distinction stops being simple
The distinction is powerful enough to be over-applied, and the over-application has a recognisable shape: an educator introduces something harder, immediate scores fall, and the fall is welcomed as proof that the change is working.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes the material was simply not understood, and at the moment of measurement the two are indistinguishable. A depressed score is evidence of difficulty and nothing more; only the delayed measurement separates productive struggle from a failed explanation.
A second limit matters in healthcare teaching specifically.
Much of what is taught in a clinical setting is procedural rather than factual, and skills run on different neural systems from facts and concepts.
The recall curve that governs declarative material does not transfer unchanged, so naming which kind of knowledge is at stake is part of using the distinction correctly rather than an academic refinement of it.
Why the ungraded first task matters more than its weight suggests
The week closes with a worksheet that carries no marks.
It asks you to list three habits of study or teaching that you presently rely on, together with whatever evidence stands behind each, two or three personal learning goals with the evidence that would show progress, and a set of diagnostic questions answered with a confidence rating from guessing to certain. The confidence column is the point.
It is the only place in the course where your own starting calibration is recorded, and the final session returns to it to compare what you were confident about against what you actually knew.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Evidence over habit as the course's opening position
- 02
Learning as durable change against performance as a current reading
- 03
The fluency illusion produced by rereading and highlighting
- 04
A four-step audit for deciding which of the two a piece of evidence measures
- 05
Declarative and procedural knowledge as a limit on the distinction
- 06
Confidence ratings recorded in Week 1 and revisited in Week 6
Auditing a session that appeared to go well
- 2Name when the measurement was taken relative to instruction.
- 2List the supports present then that will be absent at the point of use.
- 2State the narrower claim the evidence supports.
- 2Name the delayed measurement that would settle retention.
Key terms
- Fluency Illusion
- The sense of mastery produced by re-exposure to material, which reflects how smoothly it reads now rather than how much of it will survive a delay.
- Performance
- How well a learner does at the moment of measurement, with whatever cues and recent exposure are present.
- Durable Learning
- The change that persists across a delay and transfers to a situation where the original cues are absent.
- Illusion of Mastery
- A confident judgement of having learned something that rests on recognition of familiar text rather than on recall.
- Delayed Measurement
- An unsupported recall taken after a gap, which is the only evidence that distinguishes retention from recent exposure.
- Declarative Knowledge
- Facts and concepts that can be stated, supported by the route from hippocampus to neocortex.
Evidence Against Intuition in Teaching FAQ
Why does rereading feel effective when the evidence says it is not?
Re-exposure makes text smooth to process, and that smoothness is read as a sign of how much has been learned. The signal is genuine but it measures the wrong thing: it reflects familiarity built moments ago rather than what could be produced tomorrow with the page closed. Because the sensation arrives during study and the shortfall only appears after a delay, nothing in the activity itself ever corrects the impression.
How can a tutor tell whether a session worked?
Take one short unsupported recall at the start of the following session and compare it with how the group performed at the end of the previous one. A closing check made minutes after teaching is taken while cues are still present, so it reports whether the explanation could be followed. The comparison across the gap is what carries information about what survived.
Does a drop in scores after a change prove that deeper learning is happening?
No. A fall in immediate scores means the task became harder, and difficulty arises both when a productive demand has been added and when an explanation has failed. Those two possibilities look identical at the time. Only a measurement taken after a gap separates them, which is why the change should be accompanied by a delayed check rather than defended on principle.
Does this argument apply to practical skills as well?
Only partly. Procedures and habits are supported by different neural systems from facts and concepts, and they are built by repeated performance with correction rather than by recalling a description. The general warning about judging by immediate ease still holds, but the recall curve that governs factual material does not transfer to skills unchanged.
What is the point of a worksheet that carries no marks?
It records your starting position before the course argues against it. Writing down which habits you trust, what evidence you hold for each, and how confident you are in a set of diagnostic answers creates the only personal baseline available. The closing session compares those confidence ratings against accuracy, and that comparison is impossible to reconstruct afterwards.
Assessment move
Run the four-step audit on one piece of evidence about your own teaching each week: when was it taken, what supports were present, what narrower claim survives, and what delayed measure would settle it. Keep the answers, because the same four questions structure the opening reflection in the portfolio.
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