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February 21, 2006
Ed School Research: Don't Bet Your Child's Literacy On It
Jonanne Jacobs reports on a troubling, but not surprising, trend in educational research: a continued disregarding of established research methodology. She cites an entry by Douglas Reeves on the Fordham Foundation's Education Gadfly in which Reeves in turn conveys the results of a study by Peggy Hsieh and Joel R. Levin, who documented the declining use by education researchers of randomized experiments, otherwise known as field trials. Reeves:
Hsieh and Levin report that “The percentage of total articles in these four journals [Cognition & Instruction, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal of Experimental Education, American Educational Research Journal] based on randomized experiments decreased over the 21-year period in both the educational psychology journals (from 40 percent in 1983 to 34 percent in 1995 to 26 percent in 2004) and the American Educational Research Journal (from 33 percent to 17 percent to 4 percent).” [...]
Why are randomized experiments being dropped faster than a tainted control group? Hsieh put that question to a number of folks. One “speculated that with the increasing popularity of qualitative methods (i.e., not relying on quantitative data), some researchers may have rejected the underlying assumptions of experimental research in favor of a post-modern, relativist view.” A more cynical interpretation holds that because empirical research is difficult to conduct and yields unpopular results, many authors simply take their studies down an easier path. Why risk tenure by studying the effectiveness of phonics, for example, if a university promotion committee member worships at the altar of whole language? Why bother with multivariate analysis when a feminist critique of patriarchal statistical methods will do?
Emphases mine. Gee, real-world results can be a bitch, can't they? Never mind the fact that our elite universities (not to mention our second and third tier universities, nor our community colleges) are turning out functional illiterates on a daily basis. I just did an Amazon.com search on "whole language" and out of the top fifty books listed, I could find only one that was critical of this thoroughly fraudulent method. Whole language has ruined several consecutive generations of public school students; and the ed-school hucksters continue to dodge the empirical data.
If we don't correct our methods of teaching reading soon, we're sunk. It may already be too late.
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