I saw this piece in the Times called 'Guesses and Hype Give Way to Data in Study of Education' today when a pal posted it on the facebook. I read through it and had mixed feelings.
I recognize and value the statistics perhaps more than most other humanities-types due to my interest in baseball and especially in the valuation methods detailed in the book Moneyball ten years ago. There is hardly a more entrenched field in America than the baseball diamond, where there is over a hundred years of conventional wisdom regarding what makes players valuable. Moneyball details the breakdown of a great deal of that conventional wisdom.
This article suggests that a similar upheaval is happening in the world of education research. Heretofore ed research, at least according to this article, tended to be mired in abstract concepts and based on shaky premises. But there has been a tendency lately towards clinical trials. And if we trust those clinical trials in the field of medicine to the extent that we will literally trust our lives with their results, then it would follow that we ought to believe their findings in the ed world.
Some of those results are uncomfortable. No teacher who has worked in Upward Bound will be happy to hear that these trials find the program largely useless, for example. But to achieve the end of educating students as well as we can, whatever it is we might mean by that, then we have to be prepared to change our means.
In short: we ought to pay more attention to statistical studies than our forebears have. My addendum would be, however, that since I am not inclined to do these statistical studies myself, I am willing to take others' word for it on a lot of them. I'd rather be reading Blood Meridian than some bone-dry paper telling me that what we do isn't working.
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