Educational Research is a Crapshoot
In my inbox today, I found a piece of educational research which made me gasp in delighted horror:
Whiteboards' Impact on Teaching Seen as Uneven: While experts see whiteboards as powerful tools for improving instruction, teachers vary widely in their ability to use them effectively.
No, really? Haha, you could substitute 'whiteboards' with anything used in the classroom, and get the same conclusion. It's the teachers' ability to use anything effectively that is the main factor in teaching impact, not the type of tool. Morons.
Which leads me to the other thing that caught my eye — the use of the word 'crapshoot'. The etymology of this term is fascinating. 'Crap', like 'scrap', is one of a bunch of words that describe cast-offs, stuff thrown away after separation from the stuff that is useful. 'Shooting craps' is playing a dice game in which rolling the right numbers gets you something and all else is 'crap' — normally a roll of 2 or 3 on two dice.
It's also interesting to compare this to the etymology of 'raffles': late 14c., from O.Fr. rafle "dice game," also "plundering," perhaps from a Gmc. source (cf. M.Du. raffel "dice game," O.Fris. hreppa "to move," O.N. hreppa "to reach, get," Ger. raffen "to snatch away, sweep off"), from P.Gmc. *khrap- "to pluck out, snatch off." The notion would be "to sweep up (the stakes), to snatch (the winnings)." (Taken from my favourite etymology site.)
The reason this is related to educational research is Thomas Kühn, famed for his ideas on paradigmatic change in the sciences. Kühn talked about a situation in which there were plenty of scientists but no science, occurring when the vocabulary used by people doing research had not stabilised (i.e. not enough common definitions) and hence there was no way to conduct peer-reviewed or objective (objectivised?) analysis.
In other words, you have to restrict meaning artificially (and remove the rest as 'crap') or else you have no meaning. But you never know if your restrictions are meaningful — you restrict meaning solely so that you can conduct fruitful dialogues with others.
This is the real reason why educational research is a crapshoot. You throw the dice, discard what looks unnecessary, keep the good rolls. You record all the good rolls and pretend that this is all you need. On the face of it, there are more non-bad rolls than bad rolls. But what people often don't realise is that there are a lot of rolls that don't do anything at all, or which terminate a sequence but don't add value.
Nobody really knows how much value education adds to people except in terms of other social constructs which we don't really know the value of either — things like money, reputation, knowledge, power. But we have to assign values to all of these, because otherwise, our tenuous hold on human reality weakens and we either spin free of the maelstrom or are sucked under. Most of us prefer to just spin around in the whirlpool until our time is up.
Whiteboards' Impact on Teaching Seen as Uneven: While experts see whiteboards as powerful tools for improving instruction, teachers vary widely in their ability to use them effectively.
No, really? Haha, you could substitute 'whiteboards' with anything used in the classroom, and get the same conclusion. It's the teachers' ability to use anything effectively that is the main factor in teaching impact, not the type of tool. Morons.
Which leads me to the other thing that caught my eye — the use of the word 'crapshoot'. The etymology of this term is fascinating. 'Crap', like 'scrap', is one of a bunch of words that describe cast-offs, stuff thrown away after separation from the stuff that is useful. 'Shooting craps' is playing a dice game in which rolling the right numbers gets you something and all else is 'crap' — normally a roll of 2 or 3 on two dice.
It's also interesting to compare this to the etymology of 'raffles': late 14c., from O.Fr. rafle "dice game," also "plundering," perhaps from a Gmc. source (cf. M.Du. raffel "dice game," O.Fris. hreppa "to move," O.N. hreppa "to reach, get," Ger. raffen "to snatch away, sweep off"), from P.Gmc. *khrap- "to pluck out, snatch off." The notion would be "to sweep up (the stakes), to snatch (the winnings)." (Taken from my favourite etymology site.)
The reason this is related to educational research is Thomas Kühn, famed for his ideas on paradigmatic change in the sciences. Kühn talked about a situation in which there were plenty of scientists but no science, occurring when the vocabulary used by people doing research had not stabilised (i.e. not enough common definitions) and hence there was no way to conduct peer-reviewed or objective (objectivised?) analysis.
In other words, you have to restrict meaning artificially (and remove the rest as 'crap') or else you have no meaning. But you never know if your restrictions are meaningful — you restrict meaning solely so that you can conduct fruitful dialogues with others.
This is the real reason why educational research is a crapshoot. You throw the dice, discard what looks unnecessary, keep the good rolls. You record all the good rolls and pretend that this is all you need. On the face of it, there are more non-bad rolls than bad rolls. But what people often don't realise is that there are a lot of rolls that don't do anything at all, or which terminate a sequence but don't add value.
Nobody really knows how much value education adds to people except in terms of other social constructs which we don't really know the value of either — things like money, reputation, knowledge, power. But we have to assign values to all of these, because otherwise, our tenuous hold on human reality weakens and we either spin free of the maelstrom or are sucked under. Most of us prefer to just spin around in the whirlpool until our time is up.
etched with acid at 11:15:00 am
3 Comments:
As someone who has completed doctoral work in education, I found this post particularly entertaining. And true. Don't forget the true part. :-)
But truth is just another construct. Isn't it? Is it? ARGH!
:)
At least, entertainment is a useful construct.
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