I'm back from a busy week at AERA. Summing up AERA is always difficult -- it's just too large of a conference to really pick up on trends that cut across the entire field. For me, the most interesting session happened Wednesday morning, and summed up the challenges that I see within the field: how can educational research speak to public policy and how can researchers move from small, one-classroom studies to broader interventions that have a greater impact. The session was organized by the Design-based Research Collective (I'm a member); the discussants critiqued the work for alternatively not being scientific enough (a need for principled design of learning materials) and claiming to be overly scientific (from a statistician's perspective, the small-N studies done via this work are too susceptible to error to make strong claims about educational practice).
There's a lot at stake here. On the one hand, proponents of design-based research argue that educational change happens when educators and researchers on the ground iteratively refine innovations based on specific classroom studies. On the other hand, advocates of widespread reform efforts see the results of design-based research as too idiosyncratic to be the basis for broader reform, and advocate a methodological approach more similar to the medical field's clinical trials model as a means to decide "what works" for learning.
This debate is likely to go on for some time. What's exciting about this AERA session is that the debate went public and has begun to engage the broader educational community.
10:41:18 AM 
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