The Ultimate High-Five: How To Use Techniques From The Field of Neuroscience To Help Your Organization Learn From Evaluation

Written by: Katherine Haugh

Like many of my friends at the 2024 American Evaluation Association Annual Conference, I’ve been an evaluator for nearly a decade.

And over the years, something that has fascinated me is really understanding WHY and HOW people learn. You may know me from some of the visuals I’ve created (like the one below!). In making visuals like this over the years, I became super curious about WHY they were so helpful in helping myself and also other people learn.

And like a good evaluator - I did what WE do best - and I turned to the literature. And specifically to the learning sciences literature, of which the field of neuroscience is connected to.

I’ve read over a dozen learning sciences books with empirical studies about how adults and organizations learn and this led me to have a major, earth shattering AHA moment:

We an evaluation field are often approaching learning in the least effective ways.

Our classic approaches to evaluation methodologies and designs leave little to no time for learning and digestion (often leaving it for the last stage when resources are tight and energy is low). Not to mention, evaluators often do not have the skills to effectively facilitate learning and therefore are approaching it in the least effective ways (which undermines the whole purpose of the evaluation - urgh!).

What the studies show is that without active engagement with content, it is unlikely that people will learn anything at all. Passively engaging with content, like reading reports alone or listening to a presentation, is one of the most ineffective ways to help adults and teams learn. But that’s mostly how we approach learning as evaluators.

What adults need is repeated interactive and participatory approaches to learning - like group discussions, role playing, simulations and case studies - as well as structured reflection time such as journaling, peer feedback and guided discussions to help them actually learn.

We, at The Convive Collective, are on a mission to equip evaluators with science-backed techniques that are rooted in creativity and that ACTUALLY WORK to get teams to learn (and have fun doing it!)

It’s time for us to STOP gathering more data and START having higher-quality learning facilitation so that the investments organizations are making in evaluations are truly well-spent!

Here are 7 neuroscience tips that have worked in helping teams to learn from evaluations:

First things first: you may be wondering 7 - why 7? It’s because studies show that most adults can only engage with 4-7 “chunks” of information in one hour. Trying to squeeze in more content actually decreases how much we can learn overall.
Learning styles is a myth. But what we do know is that we are all visual learners. Even for those of us who will say, “I’m not a visual learner,” pairing visuals with text is highly effective. And what’s even cooler is that we learn more when we make the visuals ourselves because we are actively engaging with the content and transforming it. This helped me understand why creating visual notes and sharing them was a double whammy of effective learning facilitation for me!
The third tip is about active recall and elaboration. What is really effective is when we actively connect new information to what we already know. This is something as simple as asking people to reflect on how new information they are receiving from an evaluation relates to previous experiences.
The next one is about a topic called interleaving. I was really surprised to learn that we actually learn more effectively when we go back and forth between learning about two different things at the same time. The reason is because mixing topics helps your brain understand the relationships between different things, which strengthens understanding.
This brings me to Tip 5 - which is about spaced retrieval. It turns out that we forget almost all of what we learn within hours of learning it. The way we interrupt this natural forgetting curve is through repetition. And a fun way to repeat content without it being boring is through low-stress games, tests and competitions.
What is often overlooked in our work is the impact that stress can have on our ability to learn. When we are stressed or overstimulated, our brain stays in “level one” thinking - which is about immediately solving short term problems. This is referred to as single loop learning. As evaluators, we are often asking people to engage with us in level two thinking but if they are stressed for whatever reason - they won’t be able to engage. And so while we can’t control everyone’s stress levels or hope to influence them, we can use simple techniques to calm our own nervous systems and others in meetings where we are asking people to come together to learn. For example: something as simple as a joke. Laughter is shown to decrease stress almost instantly.
What I loved learning about in the learning sciences literature is about three concepts that are critical for learning. They are: transfer motivation, self efficacy and transfer volition. Transfer motivation is someone's desire to learn about something. Self efficacy is the belief that someone can learn about something. Transfer volition is the determination and will to do the learning. And why I loved this so much is because basically what the literature says is that people must care about what they are learning about in order to learn about it (it actually doesn’t matter if the findings are in a SUPER ugly slide deck - if they care, they will learn). And what this means for us is that we need to keep learners at the center of our learning experiences - and by that I mean designing adaptive learning plans that have the right mix of “push” and “pull tactics” that have multiple opportunities to learn about what matters to people and design learning around that.