Education Research On Trial: Policy Reform and the Call for Scientific Rigor

"Education research is a scientific field in crisis. The foundation of the current crisis is a long-time perception that too much of the work of educational researchers fails to meet minimum standards ofscientific rigor. This perception constitutes the "bad reputation" from which the field of education research suffers. Long-simmering scientific doubts became a full-blown crisis, however, when critics-mostly critics from outside the field-recently launched charges that education research has failed to provide a solid evidence base for the improvement of educational practice, in part because educational researchers have been preoccupied with the wrong questions and in part because much of their research has been based on the wrong research methods. We see, then, that the crisis of confidence in the quality of education research goes hand in hand with a crisis of confidence in the quality of American education. The solution to both sets of shortcomings, critics maintain, is to pose different research questions and address them with more "rigorous" scientific methods. The charges about the shortcomings ofeducation research and the proposed means of improving it are the subject of this book."--BOOK JACKET.