Sunday, July 7, 2002

Educational research is often attacked for not being 'scientific' enough, with critics offering the clinical trials model from medical research as an example of what educators should be doing. But even within medicine, the clinical trials approach is not suitable for all research efforts. Here's an excerpt from a New York Times story on the controversy over the role of fat in our diet. Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. These issues pop up in educational research all the time. Tightly controlled studies are attacked as irrelevent to the real needs of the classroom, while studies that lack such control are attacked as 'not scientific enough'. The problem with educational research isn't a lack of rigor on the part of researchers. It's that educational researchers are trying to understand extremely complex phenomena. 10:54:25 AM

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