The Science of the Obvious

Education's Repetitive Search for What's Already Known

By (author) R. Barker Bausell

Not available to order

Publication date:

11 September 2017

Length of book:

140 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475838152

This book poses and ultimately answers the question of whether the public schools would have been affected if no educational research had been conducted during this century. To answer this question, 12 genres of educational research are evaluated. The genres are accompanied by non-technical, annotated synopses examples of each. A case is made that the science of education as a whole is repetitive, non-cumulative, and is characterized by a circular rather than a linear trajectory.

Introduction

Chapter One: Some Examples of Educational Research that Aren’t
Chapter Two: Contributors to this Sad State of Affairs
Chapter Three: Four Once Useful Influential Genres That We Probably No Longer Need
Genre #1: Classic Learning Research
Genre #2: Secondary Analyses of Test Scores
Genre #3: Preschool or Extra-School Descriptive/Correlational Educational Studies.
Genre #4: School-Based, Descriptive/Observational Studies.
Chapter Four: Three Research Genres That Were Never Useful and Should Be Abandoned
Research Genre #5: Psychometric research:
Research Genre #6: Meta-Analysis:
Genre #7: Scale-up experiments.
Chapter Five: Three Genres that Could Have Some Potential for Creating a Meaningful Science
Genre #8: Experiments Conducted under Veridical Schooling Conditions.
Genre #9: Natural Experiments (Evaluations) Conducted within Schools.
Genre #10: Experiments Conducted in Schools under Laboratory Conditions
Chapter Six: Genre #11 – Programmatic Educational Research Conducted by a Single Investigator
Chapter Seven: Genre #12 – Recent, Well-Designed Genre-Crossing Research Considered
Important Enough to Garner Media Attention

Final Thoughts
References

Barker Bausell’s orientation toward education research and practice is consistent with his other body of work: careful analysis, removal of poetic distraction from science, with a dash of logical positivism. His desire is not to tear down education research—but rather to help build a better applied scientific foundation. Indeed, various applied sciences are directed by political and financial motives as well as by a desire to understand a topic and, in this case, help people learn better. Sometimes other motives are barriers to improvement. He illustrates misdirected efforts and effective direction, using logic, systematic empirical summary, aspects of philosophy of science, and honesty.