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by csa
709 days ago
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> Maybe you haven’t had reasons to come across such research before No op, but I’ve “come across” a lot of education research. By “come across”, I mean I’ve read so much that it makes my eyes bleed. There is some good research that yields interesting and compelling results. Rare, but out there. Usually by an individual researcher and maybe with a team. Almost never by a school of education of significant size or by (almost?) any specific field in education. Results in education are challenging to replicate by a different researcher in a slightly different context, and studies are often trivially easy to replicate and come out with a competing/contrary conclusion by controlling a variable that the original researcher mentioned but did not control for (e.g., motivated subjects versus unmotivated subjects). Additionally, much research in education is not well-designed, or is well-designed but on a relatively meaningless topic. There is a lot of touchy-feely research out there (like the idea that folks can learn math with just problem solving skills), and folks p-hack the hell out of data to support their a priori conclusions. It’s a smart thing to do to maximize funding and/or visibility in academic journals, but it is absolutely irresponsible in the quest for “truth” and knowledge, which one would hope our education researchers would want (n.b.,they largely don’t). |
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However, there are also many findings that are actually legit. As you say, they're rare, but there are enough of them to paint a surprisingly complete picture when you pull them together.
Discussed at length a couple months ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40348986