Provided by Institute of Education EPrints
What should educational research do, and how should it do it? A response
to “Will a clinical approach make educational research more relevant to
practice” by Jacquelien Bulterman-Bos
Dylan Wiliam
Institute of Education, University of London
In the article that provides the focus for this dialog, Bulterman-Bos raises two central
questions about educational research: what should educational research seek to do, and how
should it go about doing this?
Stokes (1997) suggests that there are two crucial issues in the conduct of research: whether
the research is conducted with a concern for how the results of the research will be used,
and whether the research is conducted with a concern for fundamental understanding
(Figure 1). Where neither of these is a concern the result is applied research unmotivated by
applications, which Stokes suggests is exemplified by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.
Where usage is a concern, but fundamental understanding is not, the result is pure applied
research, exemplified by the work of Thomas Edison. Conversely, where fundamental
understanding is a concern, but application is not, we have pure basic research, exemplified
by the work of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Finally, where both considerations of use,
and fundamental understanding are important, we have “Pasteur’s quadrant”—use-inspired
basic research.
<< Figure 1 about here >>
Almost from its first emergence as a field of inquiry, educational research has been
criticized for its lack of relevance to practice—and in particular that too much educational
research has emphasized a quest for fundamental understanding at the expense of
considerations of use. In 1945, J. Cayce Morrison, assistant commissioner for research in
the State Education Department in New York, lamented that there was “too wide a gap
between research at its best and much of its practice in education” (Morrison, 1945, p. 243).
The frustration appears to be caused, at least in part, by an expectation that while it was
easy to accept that problems in nuclear physics and rocket science might be difficult to
solve, educational problems should be much more tractable. As early as 1917, H. L.
Mencken pointed out that problems in the social sciences were generally far more complex
than they appeared: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat,
plausible, and wrong” (Mencken, 1917/1949 p. 443).
A similar perception appears to have driven Robert F Kennedy, in the hearings of the
Senate sub-committee on Education in 1966 to ask the Commissioner of the United States
Office of Education, Harold “Doc” Howe II, “What happened to the children? Do you
mean you spent a billion dollars and you don't know whether they can read or not?”
(McLaughlin, 1975).