Education-ish Research, III

Let’s take a look at some further criticism of education research from the Ball and Forzani paper (PDF) I discussed briefly in my first and second posts.

Education research frequently focuses not on the interactions among teachers, learners, and content—or among elements that can be viewed as such—but on a particular corner of this dynamic triangle. Researchers investigate teachers' perceptions of their job or their workplace, for example, or the culture in a particular school or classroom. Many excellent studies focus on students and their attitudes toward school or their beliefs about a particular subject area. Scholars analyze the relationships between school funding and student outcomes, investigate who enrolls in private schools, or conduct international comparisons of secondary school graduation requirements. Such studies can produce insights and information about factors that influence and contribute to education and its improvement, but they do not, on their own, produce knowledge about the dynamic transactions central to the process we call education.

Here Ball and Forzani expand their criticism of education research, pointing to a lack of good research that not only looks at teachers, students, or content but also at the interactions among these three. Their critique of the now-famous Tennessee classroom-size study illustrates clearly this further refinement of the authors' concept of research "inside education":

Finn and Achilles (1990) investigated whether smaller classes positively affected student achievement in comparison with larger classes. . . . The results suggest that reducing class size affected the instructional dynamic in ways that were productive of improved student learning. The study did not, however, explain how this worked. Improvement might have occurred because teachers were able to pay more attention to individual students. Would the same have been true if the teachers had not known the material adequately? Would reduced class size work better for students at some ages than at others, or better in some subjects than in others?

I'll leave the summary of Ball and Forzani's paper there, though it is by no means complete. I refer interested readers to the paper linked above and of course to my two earlier posts.

Next time, I'd like to take a look at some ideas that I think are missing from Ball and Forzani's paper.

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