Hammers and saws for the improvement of educational research

Educational Theory

Volumn 55, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 245-261

  Eisenhart, Margaret ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745639979     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (59)

1. Lisbeth B. Schorr and Daniel Yankelovich, "What Works to Better Society Can't Be Easily Measured," Los Angeles Times, B7, February 16, 2000.
2. Joseph A. Maxwell, Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1996), 20-21;
3. Joseph A. Maxwell, "Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education," Educational Researcher 33, no. 2 (2004): 3-5.
4. Ibid.
5. For evidence of this, see the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Public Law 107-110 (HRl), http://www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml?src1/4pb; Institute of Education Sciences, "Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training Program in the Education Sciences," (Request for Applications NCER-04-06, http:// www.ed.gov/programs/edresearch/);
6. and Joshua D. Angrist "American Education Research Changes Tack," Oxford Review of Economic Policy 20, no. 2 (2004): 201.
7. For examples of the methodologists' objections, see Donald T. Campbell, "Can We Be Scientific in Applied Social Science?" Evaluation Studies Review Annual 9 (1984): 26-48;
8. Tom Cook, "A Discussion with Tom Cook" (roundtable presentation at the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, Illinois, November 1998);
9. and Robert B. McCall and Beth L. Green, "Beyond the Methodological Gold Standards of Behavioral Research: Considerations for Practice and Policy," Social Policy Report 18, no. 2 (2004): 3-19.
10. For examples of objections raised by national groups and committees, see American Educational Research Association, "AERA Advocates for Sound Science" (resolution passed January 26, 2003, http://aera.net/meeting/ science.htm); and National Research Council, Scientific Research in Education, eds. Richard J. Shavelson and Lisa Towne (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2002).
11. Jeffrey C. Valentine and Harris Cooper, "Scaling the Quality of Causal Research in Education," in Empirical Methods for Evaluating Educational Interventions, eds Gary D. Phye, Daniel H. Robinson, and Joel Levin (San Diego: Academic Press, 2005), 2.
12. Herbert Turner, Robert Boruch, Anthony Petrosino, Julia Lavenberg, Dorothy de Moya, and Hannah Rothstein, "Populating an International Web-Based Randomized Trials Register in the Social, Behavioral, Criminological, and Education Sciences," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 589 (2003): 203-223.
13. Valentine and Cooper, "Scaling the Quality of Causal Research in Education," 7-8.
14. For more information about the Campbell Collaboration, see http://campbellcollaboration.org/; for more information about the WhatWorks Clearinghouse, see http://www.w-w-c.org.
15. McCall and Green, "Beyond the Methodological Gold Standard of Behavioral Research."
16. Derek C. Briggs, "Meta-analysis: A Case Study," Evaluation Review 29, no. 2 (2005): 87-127.
17. Anthony Petrosino, Carolyn Turpin-Petrosino, and John Buehler, "'Scared Straight' and Other Juvenile Awareness Programs for Preventing Juvenile Delinquency," in The Campbell Collaboration Reviews of Intervention and Policy Evaluations (C2-RIPE) (Philadelphia: Campbell Collaboration, 2003);
18. and Valentine and Cooper, "Scaling the Quality of Causal Research in Education."
19. David Cohen, Stephen Raudenbush, and Deborah Ball, "Resources, Instruction, and Research," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 25, no. 2 (2003): 119-142. This work will be cited as RIR in the text for all subsequent references.
20. Jeremy D. Finn and Charles M. Achilles, "Tennessee's Class Size Study: Findings, Implications, Misconceptions," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 21, no. 2 (1999): 97-109.
21. National Research Council, Scientific Research in Education.
22. I was a member of the NRC committee that prepared Scientific Research in Education. Statements made here represent my view only; they do not represent the views of other Committee members or of the NRC generally.
23. Margaret Eisenhart and Lisa Towne, "Contestation and Change in National Policy on 'Scientifically Based' Education Research," Educational Researcher 32, no. 7 (2003): 31-38.
24. See also No Child Left Behind Act of 2001;
25. and Education Science Reform Act of 2002, HR 3801, Public Law 107-279, http:// www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ies/index.html (note that this is the final version of ESRA).
26. National Research Council, Scientific Research in Education, 99-123.
27. Frederick Erickson and Kris Gutierrez, "Culture, Rigor, and Science in Educational Research," Educational Researcher 31, no. 8 (2002): 21-24;
28. Kenneth Howe, "A Critique of Experimentalism," Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 1 (2004): 42-61;
29. and Maxwell, "Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education."
30. See National Research Council, Scientific Research in Education, 108-112, for the discussion that most explicitly seems to privilege causal questions and randomized trials.
31. Ibid., 99.
32. Erickson and Gutierrez, "Culture, Rigor, and Science in Educational Research."
33. Ibid., 21.
34. Joseph A. Maxwell, "Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research," The Qualitative Researcher's Companion, eds. Michael Huberman and Matthew B. Miles (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2002), 45.
35. Ibid., 46.
36. See, for example, Robert Slavin, "Evidence-Based Educational Policies: Transforming Educational Practice and Research," Educational Researcher 31, no. 7 (2002): 15-21;
37. and Turner et al., "Populating an International Web-Based Randomized Trials Register."
38. Susan Flinspach, Interpretive Synthesis: A Methodology for Reviewing Qualitative Case-Study Research (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 103-115.
39. National Research Council, Scientific Research in Education, 99.
40. See Paul Holland, "Statistics and Causal Inference," Journal of the American Statistical Association 81, no. 396 (1986): 945-960;
41. and Paul Holland, "Evidence for Causal Influence in Education Research" (paper presented at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, California, April 2004). Holland, who also served on the NRC Committee that produced SRE, locates his view of causation in the tradition of John Stuart Mill.
42. Holland, "Evidence for Causal Influence in Education Research."
43. Ibid.
44. Holland, "Statistics and Causal Inference," 947.
45. See, for example, Howe, "A Critique of Experimentalism";
46. and Maxwell, "Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education."
47. Maxwell, "Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education," 5.
48. Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret Eisenhart, Educated in Romance: Women, Achievement and College Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
49. Maxwell, "Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education," 6-7.
50. Ibid.
51. Howe, "A critique of experimentalism," 53.
52. Ibid. See also Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
53. Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This work will be cited as MSS in the text for all subsequent references.
54. It should be noted that Flyvbjerg does not discuss education or educational research
55. For an example of a study with implications for the school choice question, see Kenneth Howe, Margaret Eisenhart, and Damian Betebenner, "A Crucible of School Choice," Phi Delta Kappan 83, no. 2 (2001): 137-146.
56. See, for example, Patti Lather, "Research as Praxis," Harvard Educational Review 56, no. 3 (1986): 257-277;
57. Patti Lather, "This IS Your Father's Paradigm: Government Intrusion and the Case of Qualitative Research in Education," Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 1 (2004): 15-34;
58. Phil Carspecken, Critical Ethnography in Educational Research: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (New York: Routledge, 1996);
59. and Elizabeth St. Pierre, " 'Science' Rejects Postmodernism," Educational Researcher 31, no. 8 (2002): 25-27.