EBM for Under 18’s is supporting teachers through the creation of resources that emphasise opportunities to teach critical thinking using health claims, opportunities that may be lost in the need to emphasise factual knowledge in such topics, especially where there is no direct link to classroom-based experiments.

At all levels, the idea of “working scientifically” is developed through age-relevant topics. The EBM for Under 18’s project is providing relevant resources to allow teachers to explicitly develop these skills in their pupils.

Resources / Lesson Plans

Cola Randomised Control Trial (RCT)
“For students and all brain workers -Take one glass Coca-Cola at night to keep the brain clear and active until eleven.”
What claim is being made? How could we test this? Is this the right type of study to answer the question?

This lesson highlights ideas associated with the following key concepts:

• Anecdotes are unreliable evidence
• Association is not the same as causation
• Treatments should be compared fairly
• Comparison groups should be similar
• People should not know which treatment they get
• Peoples’ outcomes should be assessed similarly
• Fair comparisons with few people or outcome events can be misleading