The Academy’s Zeitgeist—Standards of Scientific Investigation: Exploring the Impact on Scholarly Work (original) (raw)
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Written for a German audience, this brief overview of American educational research is organized around a number of examples of the American Educational Research Association's Divisions and Special Interest Groups. By comparing the way that foundational research concerns and disciplinary definitions are treated in America with their German counterparts, this paper arrives at the conclusion: "While academic critique or scholarly backlash is generally unable to effect policy change, the relentless instrumentalism represented by efforts at experimentally derived determinations of „what works“ are always undermined by the complexities and singularities of concrete pedagogical practice. The result is either „proven“ claims about impacts and techniques that are already widely acknowledged and implemented as „common sense“, or isolated attempts at amelioration, limited by the very cultural particularity that initially defines them."
Scientific research in education: A critical perspective
British Educational Research Journal, 2004
This article reviews the debate in the USA about quality in educational research which has underpinned particular approaches to educational research being mandated in federal legislation. It argues that the movement towards 'evidence-based policy and practice' oversimplifies complex problems and is being used to warrant governmental incursion into legislating scientific method. It calls for critical readings of current policy and direct engagement in policy forums-putting critical theory to work.
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Willard Waller, the author of the first and best sociology of teaching, described the school as a "despotism in a state of perilous equilibrium," a despotism "threatened from within and exposed to regulation and interference from without" (Waller 1932/1961) p. 11. I expect that educational administrators continue to experience threat from within and micro-management from without. To deal with such a situation they may seek help from the educational research community. Unfortunately, the educational research community faces exactly the same problem." Internally there is "little sense of community and few common standards to distinguish good from bad research, or significant from trivial" (Lagemann and Shulman 1999). Externally, the research community faces an attempt to impose a single "gold standard" for research that, if taken seriously, would eliminate most of social science and large parts of the natural sciences. As a result the embattled administrator would be seeking a cure from a group that has the same disease.
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And yet there is trepidation in the ranks. Educational researchers, like other researchers, worry that the good intentions 3 underlying the SBR movement will go awry, that narrow definitions of research or science might trivialize rather than enrich our understanding of education policy and practice, and that the splendors of unfettered scholarship will be eroded by creeping tides of conformity and methodological zealotry. Almost everyone can appreciate, intuitively, the advantages of evidence-based policy; it is another matter entirely to make this concept clear, operational, and valid. And it is another matter still to know if and how the field should respond; this is our topic. In this article we make the following arguments:
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Research in education is a value-free, unbiased, neutral, social scientific pursuit of truth, using the best methods, and models available-or so we were told when we were learning the craft. The past 30 years have witnessed dramatic changes in how we view research and education. Traditional paradigms of research of methodology now compete with a variety of qualitative approaches and critical theory has unmasked the neutrality of education. This article provides an introduction to these issues and concerns of the politics of research on education as well as an outline of each chapter.
International Journal of Educational Research, 2004
In the last decade a number of national and international activities and public policies in the US have converged to prescribe a particular conception of educational research. Randomized control trials have been set as the ''gold standard'' and educational researchers are now pressed to come up with ''solid'' evidenced-based findings of ''what works'' on the basis of which interventions can be designed to improve educational practice. These efforts have the potential to marginalize many educational researchers and practitioners and to further regiment education and schooling in ways that privilege particular interests while ignoring the local, cultural, and socio-political positioning of students, teachers and researchers. The purpose here is to understand the meaning and origin of this prescriptive move by international and national agencies, and their actual and potential consequences. This article provides an in depth analysis of a number of critical issues for the work of educational researchers and practitioners and examine the anachronistic nature of these public policies and activities, and their connection to globalization and a neo-liberal market economy. r