Is the scientific system of evidence the best for making decisions about educational programs? If not, then what is the relative value of other approaches, such as ethnography, the legal adversary model of evidence or the model of art criticism (Eisner, 1985)?
"A key requirement for evidence-based policy is the existence of scientifically valid and readily interpretable syntheses of research on practical, replicable education programs" (Slavin, 2008, p.5). As Slavin has indicated, many have called for evidence based thinking, including the Federal 1997 Obey-Porter Act and the 1001 No Child Left Behind Act. The assumption that such evidence is possible has not only classroom but large fiscal implications as well. The Obey-Porter legislation led to over 700 different models being funded for research spending over $300 million dollars a year by 2002 (Glennan, 2004, p. 146). Witness the unresolved debate by experienced researchers over research methodology that would either place Slavin's SFA (Success for All) Program in the highest Department of Education of category of effectiveness or not (Educational Researcher, 37(1)). Over 100 years after Thorndike's argument for the application of scientific thinking to education (Thorndike, 1910), consensus still eludes the field of education on basic parameters of evidence for establishing even a few points of data for program application health as compared with the use a thermometer to determine whether a patient is well or sick in medicine or whether the weather is changing slightly or significantly in meteorology. Perhaps an examination of the interactive nature of the progress of a body or a weather system or a classroom would should some light on the degree to which educators should still bloody their heads against this wall of scientific measurement. At the core of this struggle in education is a major and largely ignored but fundamental problem with the nature of measuring nonlinear systems (Cziko, 1992; Newman, 1993).
The Nature of Constant and Variable Interaction
Lehrer (1990) as referenced by Cziko noted that though at one scale a system might appear chaotically random, but at a higher scale, this disappears and predictable results can be obtained. In fact, this is not so. A chaotic system at one scale, will be chaotic at a higher scale and no more predictable. That similar patterns consistently appear, does not mean that one knows anymore about predicting where the pattern will turn next. What is missed is the unstable nature of the visible stability. Why is this so?
Eisner, Elliot (1985). The Educational Imagination. New York: Macmillan.
Glennan, Thomas Keith (2004). Expanding the Reach of Education Reforms Perspectives from Leaders in the Scale-Up of Educational Interventions. Rand Corporation.
Slavin, Robert E. et al. (2008). What works? Issues in synthesizing Educational Program Evaluations. Educational Researcher, 37(1), 5-14.
Thorndike, Edward L. (1910). "The contribution of psychology to education", Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(1), 6-8.
Cziko, Gary A. (December, 1992). Purposeful Behavior as the Control of Perception: Implications for Educational Research. Educational Researcher, 21(9) p10-18, 27. [full-text online]
Newman, Isadore et al. (Spr 1993). Chaos Modeling: An Introduction and Research Application. Midwestern Educational Researcher, 6(2), 2-6.
Rivera, Edil Torres; Wilbur, Michael; Frank-Saraceni, James; Roberts-Wilbur, Janice; Phan, Loan T.; Garrett, Michael T. (June, 2005). Group Chaos Theory: A Metaphor and Model for Group Work. Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 30(2), 111-134.
Wertheimer, Richard; Zinga, Mario (1998). Applying Chaos Theory to School Reform. Internet Research, 8(2), 101-14 .
Major Review Sources
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Houghton v .5, March 17, 2008