The challenge of evidence-based decision-making is critical to build capacity toward responsible decision-making in these times of social, ecological and environmental transformation. Evidence based management is about making informed decisions through the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of four sources of information; practitioner expertise and judgement, evidence from the local context, a critical evaluation of the best available research evidence, and the perspective of those stakeholders who might be affected by the decision.

The syllabus will cover the basic principles of Evidence-Based Management and why it is required, what do we mean by evidence, acquiring evidence from practitioners, the scientific literature, the organisation and stakeholders; methods of appraisal for multiple types of evidence, aggregating the evidence, applying the findings of the appraisal of the evidence, assessing the outcome of the decision; building the capacity for Evidence-Based Management.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to: Critically evaluate the role of individual and social cognitive biases and distortions in unconsciously shaping the way information is processed. Critically appraise the diverse sources of evidence across academic research, organisational data, stakeholders concerns and practitioner expertise, in order to produce actionable insights into specific problems of practice. Evaluate explicit and implicit claims made about management practice by applying evidence-based management tools and techniques to evaluate and test state claims and related assumptions. Analyse their organisational environment and knowledge system from the perspective of the dominance and role of multiple sources of internal and external evidence in decision-making. Generate a Critically Appraised Topic (CAT) of a specific set of evidence, including a critique of the validity, generalisability, methodological rigor, and applicability of the published research results.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to: Value the integration of managerial expertise with the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of best evidence in making decisions.

On successful completion of this module, students will be able to: N/A

The module will make significant use of case studies, existing publicly available Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) from both policy and academic sources, interactive group work and presentations which will interrogate widely available evidence and judge its quality, and self-reflection on the type and quality of evidence available in individual contexts. As such, it will support the development of responsibility in our graduates, in terms of ensuring that the evidence decisions are based on is as high a quality as possible. It will furthermore specifically support the development of articulate graduates with regard to the ability to engage with multiple, diverse sources of evidence, judiciously evaluate the quality of said evidence, produce insights and present these findings in a variety of formats, including debates, presentations and discussion forums.