Abstract:
Research in education is produced in ever-increasing amounts. Despite this, many people believe that the growth in our knowledge has been slow. This paper argues that most empirical educational research is implicitly based on one of two models or belief-structures about the nature and purposes of educational enquiry: either that it should be an effort to discover universal laws which apply to human thinking, learning and behaviour, or that it should be an attempt to provide prescriptions for the appropriate methods and techniques to use in facilitating learning. This implicit basis results in findings which, in quantitative research, use inappropriate statistical assumptions. It also leads to conclusions being expressed with too much generality.
The paper proposes that a third model may more closely reflect the nature of the reality which we are investigating: that we should explicitly recognise the difficulty of generalising about people, and should report findings and conclusions in terms of probabilities and expectations with limited scope of application, while believing this limitation to be inherent in the nature of the phenomena being studied, as in the case of weather-forecasting. Situated cognition has been accepted; situated assessment is increasingly acceptable; now it is time for a model of situated research findings.
The paper proposes that a third model may more closely reflect the nature of the reality which we are investigating: that we should explicitly recognise the difficulty of generalising about people, and should report findings and conclusions in terms of probabilities and expectations with limited scope of application, while believing this limitation to be inherent in the nature of the phenomena being studied, as in the case of weather-forecasting. Situated cognition has been accepted; situated assessment is increasingly acceptable; now it is time for a model of situated research findings.