ESPLAT 2025 conference: Scientific thinking in challenging times

In 2017, members of the EFPA Board of Educational Affairs edited a special issue in Psychology Learning and Teaching with the title “Evidence-based teaching – Examples from learning and teaching psychology” (DOI: 10.1177/1475725717701209). The basic idea was that psychological research provided theoretically sound and empirically tested principles of learning and teaching that could be applied to the teaching of psychology. The editors expected that teachers and students of psychology would particularly benefit from the application of such principles, as the basic ideas were derived from psychological research., i.e., from their own academic discipline. The articles published in the 2017 special issue demonstrated the wide range of different concepts associated with “evidence-based teaching”. In the meantime, scholars discussed different approaches to evidence-based teaching, their advantages and disadvantages, and the roles of evidence-based teaching in different academic disciplines. So, it is time to revisit this concept in the light of recent developments in learning research and modern approaches to the teaching of psychology. What exactly do we mean by “evidence-based”? What kind of evidence do we expect and accept? Does the emergence of artificially “intelligent” tools for teaching and the increasing proportion of online learning and distance teaching change our understanding of evidence-based teaching? And, surely, the question already asked in 2017 is worth to be reconsidered: Is it an over-optimistic position to expect that we apply our own research results to our own teaching? These and other questions will be discussed in a roundtable discussion.