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Is Science the Proper Metaphor for Educational Research?

Posted on: Sunday, 18 September 2005, 03:01 CDT

In a special edition of the Journal of Industrial Teacher Education, research from the previous four decades of industrial technology teacher education was reviewed. What was most notable, some have suggested, was the paucity of the results. Rupert Evans, for example, wrote that after four decades of research, little had been proven substantive with regard to educational practice. Essentially, we know that everything causes everything else, that the timing and interaction of everything is critical to the attainment of the everything else, and further, that the confidence and certainty with which we can make educational and political decisions about education is largely unfounded.

In Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, Michael Shermer asserted that there are three types of science: science, the borderlands of science (wherein most social science research resides), and nonscience or outright quackery. On a good day, a few bits of educational research might be considered science. The great mass of educational research, however, belongs in that borderlands region. This is a bitter pill to swallow, particularly for a believer in the efficacy of the scientific method for educational research.

In pursuit of his thesis, Shermer asks 10 questions that help define what good science is, and perhaps more importantly, what it is not. Essentially, Shermer repeats what any good educational research textbook would say: Science requires skepticism, reliability and validity, good instruments, a clear methodology, repeatability and rigorous control. Additionally, it requires juried reviews ofthat research. Unfortunately, educational research seldom meets all of the criteria for good science; indeed, I would suggest that some of these criteria are impossible to meet in educational research.

Shermer stakes out skepticism as a critical element of educational research, but our field doesn't foster skeptics. Education develops passionate professionals who will believe in a child's potential despite all evidence to the contrary.

Reliability and validity are largely ignored in teacher- developed instruments, and with regard to most tests and measures, few can demonstrate reliability and validity to the degree needed to qualify as precise instruments. These give casual readers and users the impression of legitimacy. In our political world, face validity alone is probably enough for an instrument to be embraced.

Research requires a clear methodology in order to guarantee repeatability. Most educational studies in peerreviewed journals show outstanding attention to methodology, but the rub is that these studies are never repeated. For science to validate a claim, experiments must be repeated by other researchers many times to gather evidence that what is claimed appears likely. This repetition is never done in educational research.

Consequently, what we do know with certainty is very limited. The type of research conducted is, of course, critical to the significance of the findings. One would expect that educational research might be concerned with learning, but in my field, survey research, the gathering of opinion predominates, and I cannot find a single example of an experimental design. A profound drawback to survey research is that we don't know if what people say (as revealed in survey research) is actually what they believe, what they think, or if the findings are actually consistent with how they behave.

This is not to disparage educational or survey research; indeed, there are many descriptive educational studies that are both well done and important. These studies largely attempt to deal with the demographics of education-the who, what, where, when and how. Although these provide information about education on a fairly grand scale, the information they provide is not the stuff of teaching and learning, but rather the kinds of data that support "systems" of education. These tell us how many students graduate, how many require special education, and how many are not native English speaking students. While this information is important-vital even- it is not central to the phenomena of teaching and learning. This sort of information is like keeping records of a city's immunizations-of course while the collection and retention and analysis of this data has important health consequences, it is not medical research.

Who does educational research? Educational research is largely conducted by individuals or agencies that have vested points of view.

"Etectera" is a department exclusively for ACTE members. If you have an opinion, a story or something to share, jot it down and send it to Susan Reese at susan@pnntmanagementinc.com.

Andrew Schultz is ITE curriculum specialist at Lincoln Public Schools in Lincoln, Nebraska. He can be reached at aschult@lps.org.

Copyright Association for Career & Technical Communications Sep 2005

Source: Techniques

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