“Data driven” or “evidence driven” (as they like to call themselves now) educators and leaders have always sought to co-opt the authority of research. It seems, however, that these leaders and educators lack a consistent and sophisticated understanding of research, and this leads them to use suspect data to support dubious conclusions. A few years Read More
Category: Research
On Design and Research
There are deep connections and similarities between design and research. Both activities progress through problem setting (understanding the context and nature of the problem), problem framing (to understand possible solutions) and problem solving (taking actions to reach logistic goals). Both design and research find participants understanding phenomena, which affects decisions and actions that are evaluated Read More
Why Educational Design Research
A previous post described educational design research, a method for designing and understanding interventions: Educational Design Research: An Emerging Planning Tool In this post, I continue developing the rationale for using this method. Compared to other planning methods and other methods of gathering data and evidence, educational design research may be perceived as necessitating greater Read More
Bridging Gaps: Research and Instruction
Education is one of several soft technologies that share an interesting trait: The scholars who discover the science behind the natural phenomena that are the basis of the technology and the practitioners who apply that science to the human purpose are different people. Other examples of human technologies marked by this trait include agriculture (botanists, Read More
Why Standardized Testing Flopped
In the fall of 2018, an article appeared in my news feed multiple times. Peter Greene, a contributor to Forbes magazine posed the question “Is The Big Standardized Test A Big Standardized Flop?” in the title of his article. No educator (or parent, or higher education professional, or employer) is going to be surprised to Read More
Humans are a Social Species
Many species live in social groups and interaction within those groups is well-known. In humans, however, social life takes on a level of complexity and sophistication that far exceeds what is observed in other social species. Michael Gazzaniga (2008), a noted neuroscientist who has studied human brains for decades, concluded “the shift to becoming highly Read More
On #Data and the Quality of Data
As an undergraduate science major, I came to understand quantitative data; we measured what we observed in the laboratory and in the field and we summarized and evaluated it to draw conclusions about the world as we saw it. Patterns in numbers were our window into the systems we studied. As a graduate student in Read More
Experience in Education: A Lesson on Consistent Thinking
Twenty years ago, I was working towards my master’s degree at the local state college. Several fo the faculty were qualitative researchers, and they shared that part of their work with their graduate students. As a “science guy,” I had experience with quantitative data, so the methods unfamiliar to me. Over time, I explored the Read More
The Application of Technology Acceptance to Educational Design
In 2016, I delivered this paper at the Annual Conference of the New England Education Research Organization. Full paper Abstract Despite a long history of computers in schools, many educators continue to struggle with the problem of creating effective technology-rich learning environments. In this exploratory research, documents collected as several K-12 schools designed systems to Read More
On the Ethics of Data Collection in Education
I stumbled across this selection from a work iI wrote about five years ago…. it still seems to apply: A part of all education research is recognizing one’s responsibility to proceed in a manner that respects the subjects, the process, and the community. Ethical researchers do not endanger the physical or emotional health of subjects, Read More