Interview with Frederick Hess: The Education Research We Need; (And why we don’t have it)

These snippets from EdNews.org.

1. First of all, what seems to be wrong with current educational research?

It's really a tale of two cities. There is a body of valuable, careful, and insightful work that tackles pressing issues in useful ways. Unfortunately, I see a much larger body of activity that is ideological, poorly designed and executed, jargon-laden, and of little interest to anyone except the researcher conducting it...

4) Let's face it…Many conferences and conventions allow small sample size work, miniscule literature reviews, and case studies to be presented, with less than stellar conclusions. Is it simply a matter of money and propagation of the status quo?

It's really a question of incentives. In most cases, faculty members need to participate in a formal session in order for their universities to fund part or all of their research travel. The result is implicit pressure to create enough opportunities to accommodate all interested scholars in some form or other. Meanwhile, there is little countervailing pressure to police the quality of presentations or scholarship. This state of affairs would be relatively harmless if it weren't for the fact that many schools and departments of education treat AERA presentations as significant evidence of academic accomplishment when it comes to awarding tenure, pay raises, and research support...

5) What ever happened to large scale studies conducted over time? Or are the "publish and present" demands so onerous on new faculty members?

Such work is indeed taking place. In fact, there is good reason to believe that there's more of it today, and that it's being pursued in a more methodologically sophisticated fashion than it was ten or twenty years ago. Unfortunately, the required resources are so substantial, the technical challenges so severe, and the timelines for such data collection so long, that this work can never address more than a fraction of the pressing questions we want to see addressed...

9) I believe that last year, I interviewed you about the sorry state of affairs in educational research. Have things gotten better worse, or stayed about the same?

These things tend not to change much from one year to the next. When we're talking about educational research in America, we're talking about tens of thousands of individuals in thousands of academic, nonprofit, and government institutions. Movement in any direction is going to be extraordinarily slow and gradual. That said, it is hard to know much about what kind of quiet changes may be happening. For all the attention that education researchers have devoted to critiquing schools' measurement and thought, little effort has been devoted to determining empirically what research gets done and how rigorous or relevant it actually is...