A guide for the perplexed: Scientific educational research, methodolatry, and the gold versus platinum standards

The paper opens by characterizing recent discourse about empirical educational research as the “new Babel”-critics, using different theoretical vocabularies and making different deep assumptions about the nature of social life, are failing to communicate with each other. After locating some of the critical positions on a left-right continuum, the main discussion focusses upon the end of this continuum where there are located the recent attempts to restore rigor to educational research by using the so-called “gold standard” of randomized field trials. It is argued that positions at this end of the continuum misrepresent the nature of science, and some examples are briefly mentioned in order to covey the point that it is fruitful to view scientists as making convincing cases, cases that appeal to a wide variety of evidence. This assessment of scientific cases is called the “platinum standard”.     

The triangel (socio-therapeutical institute)

We have given a brief outline of the work which is being done at the Triangel. We do not pretend to present a report based on a scientific justification. The aid we give seems to be better described as “the arm around the shoulder of someone in distress” than by the use of precise scientific terms. The common, natural reaction to a disturbed person is a spontaneous gesture of help. We should not try to classify him, or to adopt an attitude of cool scientific interest. The natural, instinctive approach seems to us the most obviously supportive and in this respect the Triangel would seem to serve as a model for all assistance agencies.     

Impact factor and education journals: a critical examination and analysis

Scientific journals are the primary mode of formal communication in science. The ISI Impact factor, a bibliometric indicator that measures the citation rate of the “average” article in a journal, has been widely used for the assessment of the quality of scientific production of individuals, research teams or institutions. The purpose of this paper was to present the impact factor, examine the main limitations in its calculation and applications and to give a general overview of the impact factor of education journals for the period 2000–2005. Several problems related to the calculation of the impact factor have raised serious concerns about its validity and usefulness. Our findings suggest that education journals included in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) represent about 11% of the active, referred, academic journals. Education journals have relative low impact factors, in absolute values and in comparison to other Social Science categories. Application of the intraclass correlation coefficient showed that journals belonging to the “Education and Educational Research” category had relative stable impact factor values for the examined 6 years. This was not the case for the journals from the “Education, Special” category. It was concluded that the use of impact factor for the evaluation of journals, articles and researchers should be done with considerable care.     

On spirituality and education

It is a mistake to ignore the scientific study of spirituality. Research examining the structure and function of concepts such as “spirit” and “spirituality” is likely to reveal new insights into the relationship between a functional spirituality and other thinking skills, including creativity. The study of spirituality should not stand alone as a discrete, somewhat eccentric, focus of enquiry. There should, instead, be an effort at synthesis with mainstream psychological science and basic and applied research in the field of education. There should be some effort made to examine the functional significance of a functional spirituality. Educational researchers should feel free to consider spirituality as a focus for dialogue and exchange with colleagues and students alike. The students in my class, and some of my colleagues, may have at first recoiled slightly when I began asking them for their thoughts on spirituality, but the dialogue has been truly stimulating, interesting, and enlightening.     

FACT — Families and children together

Following is a project sketch of a day program for adjudicated, abusive^* and high risk families with babies 8–18 months of age.In order to broaden understanding and treatment of the battered child, four major agencies coordinated efforts to design a network of services under one administration, titled the Parental Stress Center, which houses a residential treatment center for babies 0–12 months. The FACT program is a very recent addition to the Parental Stress Center. This day program may be a transitional placement for families leaving the residential program but in need of continued support and further training, or an initial placement by court mandate.The goals of the program are to insure growth and development of the child and the parent; to assist in establishing more scientific and legally acceptable criteria for court determination and disposition, and to research the effectiveness of the program plan.The FACT program is both diagnostic and therapeutic in nature. The modality simulates a home environment — living, dining, play, nursery, kitchen and bathroom — with an interdisciplinary approach to parent and child, alleviating frustration and stress. By use of materials and affective behavior, a creative learning environment is established. In the church converted apartment parents and children experience a “typical” day's routine alongside teachers who are surrogate, model mothers. Each set of parents are given one day off per week. This “normalizing” factor aids the family in developing a routine which can easily be transferred to their own homes and lives. Simultaneously judicious use of social services helps remove environmental frustrations. In addition case conferences allow other ancillary services to assist in evaluation, diagnosis, prognosis and implementation. Joint conclusions are submitted to the courts quarterly or biannually for further jurisdiction. Although the program is relatively new, emotional and behavioral changes are quite evident in the initial program participants.Pre-service and in-service staff training, based on the program plan and program evaluation, are an integral part of the program.Areas are being explored for further in-depth study. “Effective ways to care for and educate stressful toddlers” or “Methods of transferring modes of parenting from institution to the home” could be areas proposed to the Parental Research team for exploration.     

Educational goals and the assessment of what everybody should know: Where to stop?

Recently, the term “basic education” was given legal status in The Netherlands; it substituted the previously used term “primary education.” In speaking about primary or lower education, we as educators indicate a sequence in time; the term “basic education” is preferable because it refers to the content of education. Consequently, we cannot escape defining the content of the term “basic.” It is especially important to ask what criteria have to be applied in the process.     

Education and the Religious Thinker

This paper is concerned with the process of religious thinking as a linguistic form of investigating the world of values, which stands in contrast to theology and religious studies. It hinges around Wittgenstein’s comment, “I am not a religious man but I cannot help but see every question from a religious point of view.” It argues that scientific modes of thought are now so dominant that values education of all types are distorted as science itself was once distorted in an age when theological language held sway. The result today is the worrying growth of what is usually termed fundamentalism or literalism. The paper introduces the thinking on this issue from the curriculum theories of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, which have been ignored for nearly two centuries, before examining the work of a modern scholar, Christopher Arthur. Finally Whitehead’s insights arising from his later works are brought into play to conclude the argument.     

‘Scaffolding’ through talk in groupwork learning

In the present study, we develop and deploy a conceptual framework of “scaffolding” in groupwork learning, through the analysis of the pursuit of a learning goal over time. The analysis follows individuals’ different experiences of an interaction as well as collective experiences, considering individual attainment as a result of a bi-directional contextualized conversation and action. We detect, describe and evaluate two (2) types of interaction that can be characterized as “scaffolding process”: the first concerns “Scaffolding individual thinking” and the second “Scaffolding collective thinking”. The latter, apart from presenting the educational advantages of collective thinking through peer discussion (D) and curriculum-focused evaluation context of Teacher Initiation – Student Response – Teacher Follow up (IRF), also presents the advantage of ‘spiral’ verbal exchanges in which the teacher “tunes in” to the students’ present state of ability or understanding (spiral IDRF).     

Implicit rewards in the classroom

Although well established in a range of situations, the application of operant methodologies to typical classrooms is often difficult for teachers because of logistic considerations which may lead to a subgroup of a class being rewarded, with peers showing performance decrement. This paper reviews the use of “vicarious” and “implicit” rewards in both special and normal classrooms, critically examining previous literature and concluding that several key issues are open to speculation. A series of four further studies which were designed to investigate some of these issues and overcome some of the design and methodology flaws of previous research are reported, with several important distinctions being drawn between “vicarious reinforcement” effects and outcomes from “implicit reward” situations. Criterion variables are discussed, with several key findings suggesting that the concept of vicarious reinforcement as based upon the general literature is simplistic and inaccurate. Suggestions are made for the successful use of “implicit reward” procedures in the classroom.     

Disentangling the effect of education on emergency department utilization

Since Grossman’s seminal paper in 1972, there have been a number of studies concerning the effect of education on health and health care demand. Though several studies have distinguished between preventive and curative care, no study has investigated the effects of general education on the utilization of unnecessary emergency department use. We test whether general education reduces “potentially unnecessary” emergency department utilization and provide a measure of the resulting private benefits associated with increased education. Our results partially confirm our hypothesis regarding “potentially unnecessary” emergency department use. We find that moving from a high school to greater than high school education appears to reduce “potentially unnecessary” emergency department use, with the impact being greater among the insured. However, though reducing the education level from high school to less than high school increases “potentially unnecessary” emergency department use among the insured as predicted, it has the opposite impact on the uninsured.     

Contradictions in theorizing and implementing communities in education

Past educational improvement endeavors were fundamentally centered on the learner as an individual. This changed by the early 1990s after an increasing number of educators and researchers embraced sociocultural learning concepts such as “communities of practice,” “communities of learners,” and “knowledge-building communities.” These ideas are originally grounded in a dialectical materialist, cultural-historical theory of activity, or, as Lev Vygotsky called it, in a “concrete human [social] psychology.” However, as these concepts filtered into Western scholarship, some of their defining characteristics have been lost or downplayed. The intention of this article is thus to offer a more complete theorization of the educational notion of community that is centered on collective activity or practice mediated by history and culture/society. Two case studies, which exemplify learning communities using this lens, conclude the paper.     

Socializing the knowledge transfer problem

A central issue in acquiring knowledge is its appropriate transfer beyond the contexts and contents of first acquisition. In contrast to dominant “common elements” transfer theory, an interpretive perspective is developed, according to which “appropriate transfer” is a concept socioculturally rather than objectively defined. “Elements” perceived by the thinker as common between the current and a prior situation are not given in the nature of things but “read” in terms of the thinker's culturally-influenced categorization system, of problem types. A synthesis of cognitive research findings identifies specific features of thinking-skills instruction effective for promoting transfer. These include learning about and practicing knowledge application in multiple contexts of use, constructively participating in bridging instruction across school and nonschool problem situations, thinking and self-management skills taught within domains, and synergistic integration of the learning of different subjects. Recommendations are made for developing new learning technologies that build upon these conditions for enhancing knowledge transfer.     

The evaluation and research of multi-project programs program component analysis

This paper will consider ways to study educational reform efforts in order to allow policy-making to be developed on a relatively sound basis. At present, educational policy-making often derives from a pastiche of available anecdotes, research-based “good” ideas, and previous administrative guidelines. Educational evaluation efforts should not be used merely to identify and label programs as either “successes” or “failures” at a global level, but rather to permit the analyses of elements or components of programs which seem to be making positive contributions to a common sense perception of program success. A comprehensive, developmental sequence for such evaluation will be described.     

Anger in relation to school learning

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the study of emotions. This is especially true for anger, which had neither been studied intensively in main stream psychology nor in educational psychology. The focus in the first part of this article is on the conceptualization and measurement of anger. A distinction is made between various anger constructs: “Trait-Anger” refers to a frequency judgment about experiencing anger, “Anger-In” and “Anger-Out” are typical ways in which students express their anger, and “Anger-Control” refers to the way students try to reduce their Anger-In or Anger-Out. In the second half of the article, an attempt is made to demonstrate that specific ways of expressing and controlling one's anger may differentially affect school results, as reflected in grade-point-average (GPA) for native language learning. The predictive power of the separate anger measures is investigated as well as the predictive power of various product terms including anger measures, anxiety and coping profiles. The implications of these findings for learning and instruction are discussed.     

The effects of prior information upon perceptions of exceptional children

Students in a university special education course were shown three identical videotapes of children in a school setting. The subjects were randomly divided into three groups, each receiving different written background information (“positive,” “neutral,” or “negative”) prior to viewing the videotapes. It was found that the variations in written information had significant effects upon the subjects' perceptions of the children's behavior, and upon the degree to which the children were regarded as able to function successfully in a regular classroom. These findings suggest that attitudes toward exceptional children are influenced by the way in which prior information, such as that contained in a child's educational records, is presented. Teacher and peer acceptance of exceptional children can be increased if information is presented in a realistic and positive manner.     

Toward better research on child abuse and neglect: Making definitional issues an explicit methodological concern

In the United States, research on child abuse and neglect is frequently criticized for being poorly performed and largely irrelevant to the important policy questions facing the field. Many of the problems plaguing research on child abuse and neglect are endemic to social science research generally, and this paper does not trod over such issues, which are well known and well described elsewhere. Instead, this paper describes how the inadequacy of definitions of “child abuse” and “child neglect” used by research studies places an additional—and largely unnoticed—burden on research, which aggravates the impact of these more general problems. Existing definitions of “child abuse” and “child neglect” fail to meet research needs because they lack: (1) comparability, (2) reliability, and (3) taxonomic delineation. As a result, they compromise the findings of incidence studies, sequelae studies, etiological studies, and program effectiveness studies. Therefore, if real progress is to be made in understanding child abuse and neglect, definitional issues must become an explicit methodological concern. Specifically, future research should include: (I) a careful determination of definitional needs, (2) the development of operational definitions to meet those needs, and (3) the circumspect statement of findings based on the limitations imposed by such definitions.     

Tests, test scores and teachers of young children: Reflections on two case studies

Meet Melanie. She's a first-grader who's just taken her first standardized test. Melanie is a bright and happy child; but she's just been branded “below average” by the people who make tests--because she didn't feel well the morning of the test and it was hard to concentrate. … Yesterday, a bright child. Today, “below average.” (NEA, 1980)     

Two approaches to the handling of child abuse: A comparison of the English and Dutch systems

The legal and administrative systems for handling child abuse cases in England and The Netherlands are briefly described and it is argued that the two systems illustrate respectively the “legal” and “medical” models. The implications for this in practice are contrasted. In England the stress is on careful adherence to criteria for abuse, on procedures for placing children's names on child abuse registers, and removing them if they are no longer at risk, while in The Netherlands the stress is on family need with the abusive incident being regarded as no more than a signal that help is needed. This allows a much wider definition of abuse. In England sexual and emotional abuse are still relatively rarely used as grounds for intervention whereas in the Netherlands concepts such as “cognitive abuse” and “sexual neglect” are gaining currency. Other implications of the models such as differences in attitudes to confidentiality and public attitudes to authority and to seeking help are considered, as are the consequences for incidence figures. The handling of two cases with very similar circumstances are compared. Finally, it is argued that while each system might present the other with new ideas, the systems have to be seen in the social context of the two countries and neither system is likely to appear superior to professionals in the other country.