The Ultimate High-Five: Using Neuroscience To Actually Help Teams and Your Organization Learn from Evaluation

Abstract Information: As evaluators, our job is to help our clients learn from evaluations, right? Decades of research show that adults learn very little from passive activities like reading written reports. But somehow, the main product that we as evaluators produce to facilitate learning is still reports. If we’re walking the talk on using data, collective wisdom, and feedback from our clients to inform our evaluation practice, how can we allow our field to continue using practices that have proven to be ineffectual? In addition, while we know that data visualization and other types of visual storytelling techniques help facilitate learning (not all visualizations, but some!), we are still over-relying on passive engagement with content to fuel learning. And we know from experience and research that simply does not work to help individuals, teams, and organizations learn from evaluations. What we need is waiting for us in the fields of learning science and neuroscience: what research shows about how adults actually learn and what we can do about it as evaluators. These fields have uncovered what techniques actually work to help adults learn from information and from each other. This science has simply not arrived in the evaluation sector. Until now. Join The Convive Collective for a highly interactive, practical session about the top 10 techniques and tools to actually help your teams and clients learn, backed by research conducted in the learning sciences and neuroscience. This session will be engaging, enlightening, and immediately useful for all evaluators - whether they are just beginning their career in evaluation or they are advanced in their practice and seeking new energy and perspectives. We’ll present how we use these learning techniques and tools in our practice at Convive and the impact they’ve had not only on the depth of learning that was made possible for our clients but also on how these ways of thinking and working are sticking with our clients long after our engagement with them. If concepts like interactive Evidence Days, interactive data debates, real-time data dashboards, sensemaking with visual stories, creating newspaper headlines from evaluation data, visual theory of change workshops, challenge scenarios, game show concepts, and learning champion awards make you feel curious and excited, then this is the session for you.