Education-ish Research, II

Last time, we took a look at a paper that called education research to task for too often being "related" to education, rather than "inside" it.

In future posts, I'd like to briefly summarize some of the authors' further criticisms of education research and then describe and comment on their suggestions for fixing the problem.

In this post, however, I'd like to highlight a key point that the authors, Ball and Forzani, make in the introduction to their paper. Although they do not explicitly link this point to their criticism of education research, I see no reason to consider the two to be unrelated:

One impediment is that solving educational problems is not thought to demand special expertise. Despite persistent problems of quality, equity, and scale, many Americans seem to believe that work in education requires common sense more than it does the sort of disciplined knowledge and skill that enable work in other fields. Few people would think they could treat a cancer patient, design a safer automobile, or repair a bridge, for these obviously require special skill and expertise. Whether the challenge is recruiting teachers, motivating students to read, or improving the math curriculum, however, many smart people think they know what it takes. Because schooling is a common experience, familiarity masks its complexity. Powell (1980), for example, referred to education as a "fundamentally uncertain profession" about which the perception exists that ingenuity and art matter more than professional knowledge. Yet the fact that educational problems endure despite repeated efforts to solve them suggests the fallacy of this reliance on common sense.

Ball and Forzani here accurately describe the environment in which many of our discussions of and debates about education take place. Instruction itself is shielded from our view by ideas—some of which may indeed be correct—that are too often based on common-sense notions about education. As a result, good questions and reasoned arguments that challenge fundamental assumptions about instruction are brushed aside without consideration.

I certainly have experience with this. Not too long ago I brought up a question with my (now former) colleagues--one that I discuss here: If we expect students to be able to represent data accurately and efficiently, then why do we present students with data representations that are neither accurate nor efficient? On that specific occasion, I was talking about bar graphs that were purposely designed to make the data values hard to ascertain and/or graphs that wasted space, as there were only three or four data values to consider. Both of these characteristics are characteristics of bad graphs. Yet there we were, teaching kids how to read and create bad graphs. Shouldn't we--can't we--do it differently? Nope.

One of the all-too-common assumptions underlying this practice and many others like it is the assumption that no matter what kind of content we present to students, they'll eventually get the right idea. Another assumption is that third graders can handle 4 or 5 bars on a graph, but if you push it to 10 or 20, they will spontaneously combust. (Research showing that 8- to 10-year-olds cannot selectively attend to different parts of a 10-bar graph without becoming distracted [such that it impairs learning] would be evidence for the need to move the introduction of bar graphs up to a later grade; it should not be a justification for presenting students with bad bar graphs.)

Devlin makes a point similar to that put forward by Ball and Forzani at the end of his September 2008 article:

While most of us would acknowledge that, while we may fly in airplanes, we are not qualified to pilot one, and while we occasionally seek medical treatment, we would not feel confident diagnosing and treating a sick patient, many people, from politicians to business leaders, and now to bloggers, feel they know best when it comes to providing education to our young, based on nothing more than their having themselves been the recipient of an education.

One may presume, given that Ball and Forzani and then Devlin ascribe this common-sense view of education to "many Americans," or to "politicians, business leaders, and bloggers," that these people consider, or are justified in considering, education researchers or teachers or other education professionals to be immune from similar assumptions and common-sense notions. Of course, they don't and aren't.

Thus, if education researchers are as susceptible as the rest of us to a "common sense-y" view of instruction impervious to reasoned probing, this may explain, in part, Ball and Forzani's criticism of education research as dealing with questions "related to" education rather than questions "inside" education. Many researchers may simply avoid questions inside education because their common sense has already answered them.


Ref: D. L. Ball, F. M. Forzani (2007). 2007 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture--What Makes Education Research "Educational"? Educational Researcher, 36 (9), 529-540 DOI: 10.3102/0013189X07312896