EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH – WHAT DO WE THINK IT’S GOOD FOR? ELANA JORAM CET – APRIL 6, 2016

THE PROBLEM  Began with teaching  Very common to say “research has found”  Noticed led to glaze  Like speaking two different languages

TWO WAYS OF THINKING (from FRIEDSON,1970) Clinical Mind Investigator Mind Immediacy Particularistic Case-based Future-oriented Generalizing Population or group-based

THE STUDY  Interviewed three groups: preservice teachers, teachers who were UNI grads, teacher education professors  Presented several dilemmas and asked series of questions  Designed to get at:  Whether participants thought educational knowledge gained through research can be falsified  Whether they thought educational knowledge gained through research can be generalized or applied to another group or setting

Each child is different Core Idea Therefore, you can never falsify educational knowledge because it could always be valid for one child somewhere Therefore, you cannot generalize/apply findings from a study because the group you wish to apply the findings to will be different from the initial sample on which you collected data

THE “CLASH”  Professors did not voice this view  Their beliefs and assumptions about the nature of educational knowledge and research were often very different from many of the preservice and practicing teachers  We need to recognize that there is sometimes huge difference that may be incommensurate

IMPLICATIONS For Teaching:  DON’T say “research has found…” if you want to get students’ attention  DON’T swing other way and only teach “bag of tricks”  DO immerse students in work in which they will discover similarities among students  DO provide liberal examples and interweave concepts with those examples so students encounter “embodied theory”

 show limitations of some of the beliefs relevant to research  e.g., good to consider external validity of a study, but not to the point where we expect the population you wish to generalize to and the study sample to identical on all characteristics  Recognize goal not to discover simple cause and effect relationships (e.g., “if the teacher does x, the students will learn y”) but rather more probabilistic ideas (e.g., “if teacher does x, students more likely to learn y”), taking into account external validity IMPLICATIONS – FOR GRAD STUDENTS

IMPLICATIONS – FOR THE FIELD  Practitioners, teacher educators, and educational researchers may differ in their assumptions about the nature of educational knowledge, what constitutes evidence for this knowledge  Leads to different degrees of receptivity to different kinds of research  Need to recognize and be cognizant of epistemological assumptions when talking about research, recognize differences