[Drakeman]

Education and its trying-to-be-legitimate partner Educational Psychology is even worse. It is essentially a smal set of theories based on very small sample quantitative and sketchy qualitative research. There's an added bonus of philosophical and political policy initiatives that go against accepted theory "just cause."

[edtechdev]

Yeah there's a 'hard science' crowd among educational (psychology) researchers, that only accepts quantitative, experimental, randomized studies, but even that form of research has serious flaws when applied to education. They ignore biases that can affect results (most often experimenter expectancy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer-expectancy_effect ), and they ignore ecological validity (many findings 'from the lab' end up not working at all, being weakened or even reversed when tested in a classroom). On top of all this, they never open source their software (if any), and they don't share the data.

As one person put it, these studies, usually done with college student volunteers as participants, "include participants who have no specific interest in learning the domain involved and who are also given a very short study time" (http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-the...)

Most research is driven by the constraints of tenure-track jobs. Theory doesn't get you tenure. Journal articles with empirical p values < .05 do, regardless of whether they are never replicated, never applied to the field, and never influence changes in practice.

Doing theory takes more time and more space (word wise) than a typical journal affords - it's more compatible with books than journal articles, and most journals don't publish theoretical articles. Books are often not counted for tenure, actually: http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/would-dewey-piaget...

On top of all this, educational research is barely funded at all. Engineering and medical organizations usually spend 5-15 percent on research & development. In education it is more like 0.01 percent - the majority of which is spent on research, not development. http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/05/18/the-state-of-educa... http://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/need-more-d-in-edu...