Educational Psychology: Concepts, Research and Challenges

Christine M. Rubie-Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136880742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Research in educational psychology has had a huge impact in terms of enhancing understanding and challenging thinking about teachers and learners. Educational Psychology: Concepts, Research and Challenges brings together the latest research across many areas of educational psychology, introducing and reporting on the most effective methodologies for studying teachers and learners and providing overviews of current debates within the field. With chapters from international authors, this academic text reveals theoretical overviews and research findings from across the field including:

• 
  
  

• teaching and learning
• research methods
• motivation and instruction
• curriculum – reading, writing, mathematics
• cognition
• special educational needs and behaviour management
• sociocultural and socioemotional perspectives
• assessment and evaluation.

Educational psychology has historically had a focus on students with particular learning needs. This book provides a discussion about the gradual movement toward inclusion and the possibility of developing a more cohesive and potentially more effective education system for all students. It also provides recent research into effective behaviour management and presents specific and valuable techniques employed in applied behaviour analysis. The contributors also deliver analysis on the motivation of students and how home and society in general can contribute towards constraining or enhancing student learning.

This book is a must-read for academics, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students who recognize the substantial contribution of educational psychology to increasing our understanding of students and their learning, teachers and their teaching.

Chapter 1
Research methods in education

Contemporary issues

Lottie Thomson and Angelika Anderson

In the United States, the emphasis in recent reforms in education on accountability and outcomes-based activities has encouraged a surge of research interest. An industry of task forces and research activity, variously described as a movement (Kratochwill and Shernoff 2004) or a bandwagon (Hoagwood and Johnson 2003), depending on one’s perspective, has developed. Mandates within American legislation (the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, in particular) are requiring educators to embrace and implement what has come to be known as evidence-based research, or evidence-based practice (Dirkx 2006; Kratochwill 2002; Gutkin 2002; Reschly 2004; Schaughency and Ervin 2006).

Although there is considerable disagreement about what constitutes evidence, or what it means to engage in evidence-based practice, there is general agreement that education needs to move towards evidence-based practice. ‘Appropriate concern exists that investment in practices that lack adequate empirical support may drain limited resources and, in some cases, may result in the use of practices that are not in the best interest of children’ (Horner et al. 2005: 176). Our modern world needs educated people. Young people who have been failed by schools have few prospects. It is obvious that education should be accountable to them. Yet so far education resists or at best avoids systemic reform and development informed by cycles of innovation, improvement and evaluation, and therefore still moves from fad to fad (Slavin 2002).

A dominant view (Shavelson and Towne 2002) is that the term ‘evidence-based practice’ refers to a body of scientific knowledge about a range of educational practices that denotes research-based, structured and manualized practices that have been tested by rigorous, systematic and objective methods via randomized trials in which experimental and control groups or conditions are used to establish causation and to assess the magnitude of effects – the ‘gold standard’ of research (Dirkx 2006; Hoagwood and Johnson 2003; Kratochwill and Shernoff 2004; Walker 2004).

Definitional and inclusion–exclusion criteria have been problematic and there is considerable disagreement on these issues among professionals (Dirkx 2006; Hoagwood 2003–04; Kratochwill and Hoagwood 2005; Walker 2004). The debate has been particularly heated, as the definitional issues strike at the heart of the nature of research and science itself. Legislation has been criticized as being more concerned with promoting political and ideological agendas than improving the education of children. These critics also see it as fostering retrograde science, negating or dismissing qualitative methodologies and alternative epistemologies that have developed and gained respectability over the past 30 years (St. Pierre 2006). ‘The stakes are high, because the very nature of science and scientific evidence and therefore the nature of knowledge itself is being contested by scholars and researchers who think and work from different epistemological, ontological and methodological positions’ (ibid.: 239). What constitutes evidence and evidence-based practice is a central and contentious issue (Waas 2002).

Some identify two components in evidence-based practice. Hargreaves, in a seminal lecture on the topic, defines ‘evidence-based education’ as operating on two levels; first, ‘to utilize existing evidence from worldwide research and literature on education and related topics’, and second, ‘to establish sound evidence where existing evidence is lacking or of a questionable, uncertain, or weak nature’ (Hargreaves, cited in Brusling 2005: 88). In practice, then, there might be two concurrent processes that practitioners are required to engage in: the process of drawing on the best available evidence to inform practice, on one hand (which requires knowledge about what counts as evidence), and the process of monitoring the effectiveness of one’s own practice on the other (which requires a scientific and critical approach to one’s practice). Some also suggest that the implementation of evidence-based practice is different at different levels. For policy-makers, decisions tend to be long-lasting and hard to change, and mistakes costly. Decisions made at this level therefore require more robust and generalizable evidence than the day-to-day decisions that teachers make. Teachers should perhaps be encouraged to draw on their own experience and expertise as well as existing evidence, and consider the specifics of a given context (Brusling 2005).

At the classroom level, evidence-based practice might be more about a particular way of practising teaching, incorporating ongoing monitoring of one’s own effectiveness, essential in a context such as education where there is a dearth of high quality experimental studies, and where the specific context can have a powerful effect on the effectiveness of given strategies and treatments. Few educational studies can match the so-called gold standard. For example, Herman (2002), in describing the research on comprehensive school reform in the United States, reported that only one of 130 studies could meet this criterion. Perhaps the best approach is to bring the discussion back to a common denominator, and that is the desire to build knowledge and expertise.

In line with the above argument, a discussion on appropriate research methods to promote evidence-based practice in education needs to clearly identify the specific purpose of the research. There are then essentially two questions: first, what kind of research is sufficiently rigorous to count as evidence, such that it should inform practice?, and second, what kind of research methods are required, and are sufficiently rigorous to enable a practitioner to monitor and demonstrate their own effectiveness – that is, what are acceptable and appropriate research methods in education and educational psychology? It is questions such as these that might stimulate much needed research in this field at several levels.

It is unfortunate, therefore, and a distraction, that the paradigm wars and skirmishes of the past 20 years, which many thought had reached a truce as the legitimacy of the qualitative paradigm became more established (Guba and Lincoln 2005), have been reignited. A number of researchers have railed against the narrow definition of science as positivism and methodology as quantitative which they see as being strongly promoted through legislation (Berliner 2002; Erickson and Gutierrez 2002; Pellegrino and Goldman 2002; St Pierre 2002). Berliner (2002) goes so far as to say that ‘evidence-based practices’ and ‘scientific research’ are code words for positivistic methods. Science, however, is not synonymous with one particular method and indeed the positivistic approach is simply not feasible in many of the complex situations in education (Feuer et al. 2002; Reid and Robinson 1995).

Indeed, it can reasonably be argued that what we are experiencing at this time is a resurfacing of a long-standing methodological crisis in research in educational psychology – a crisis first identified at the end of the nineteenth century by Windelband (cited in Pajares 2007) – and not yet, according to Bruner (1996), successfully resolved. Psychologists have been pulled between the research methods of the physical sciences and those of the humanities – between nomothetic and idiographic epistemologies: that is, between the search for universal laws that could apply across contexts and the belief that phenomena can only be understood in relation to the situated, contextual factors that bind them. According to Bruner (1996), most psychologists have chosen to value the universal and to devalue the particular. Pajares (2007: 23) agrees: ‘The quest for universal truths is not only prevalent but deeply entrenched in educational and psychological research.’

It can be argued that progress will not be made as long as we flounder in this quagmire of controversy and debate. The maintenance of polarized positions is a fundamental problem bedevilling educational and psychological research. Warring factions must step back from entrenched positions to examine the salient issues and develop an integrative approach that will assist us to ground policy and practise decisions in better evidence. So, let us bring the discussion back to basics and to a common denominator. The purpose of research is to generate knowledge. Research questions must guide researchers’ selection of scientific methods, and different methodologies are needed to address different types of research question (Berliner 2002; Feuer et al. 2002; Odom et al. 2005; Shavelson and Towne 2002). Scientists and social philosophers as diverse as B. F. Skinner, John Dewey, and Jürgen Habermas have emphasized that the appropriate match between questions and methodology is an essential feature of scientific research (Odom et al. 2005). The question must drive the method. The merit or otherwise of any particular research method can only be judged by its ability to answer the identified research question. ‘The overzealous adherence to the use of any given research design flies in the face of this fundamental principle’ (Feuer et al. 2002: 8).

Research for the purpose of identifying ‘what works’ is quite specific. It needs to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a particular intervention is effective, or more effective, most of the time and under most circumstances, than no intervention or some other currently used practice. To find out what works requires true experiments. But there are other important questions which require a different approach.

For example, in the context of an entirely new field of enquiry (such as to explore the effect of student location in a classroom on student participation), exploratory, descriptive studies might first be designed to identify factors that may affect a situation or outcomes. Through direct classroom observations, one might notice that a relationship exists between the rate of participation of students and their physical location in a classroom (see, for example, Adams 1969).

A correlational study might then follow to reveal that in most classrooms students who sit at the rear of the room are asked fewer questions (see, for example, Dykman and Reis 1979). At present we still do not know why this is the case. To answer this question requires the experimental manipulation of different conditions (the same student sitting sometimes at the front and sometimes at the rear, for example) to establish if a functional relationship exists between variables. In our example, a well-conducted experiment might show that questioning rate is purely a function of location in the room, and not of some other student or teacher characteristic (e.g. Moore and Glynn 1984).

Even the simple example above illustrates some of the challenges, such as the importance of context. To what extent are the findings above valid or important in a classroom that is organized very differently? For example, if the teacher were to engage the class in cooperative group activities, say, ‘numbered-heads-together’ (Kagan 1994), student participation would increase no matter where the student was seated. Factors other than location would be important. In such a context we would need to ask entirely different research questions.

All quality research (exploratory, correlational, or experimental) should meet certain standards: our measurement systems need to be reliable and valid, and the general approach should be characterized by rigour, transparency, and accountability. Are we attempting to rule out biases, are we permitting even those answers to our questions that we are not looking for? Is the effect widely applicable? Does our work build meaningfully on the work of others? Is there enough thick description to satisfy a critical audience? Could a practitioner make use of the description to develop an equally effective intervention in their own setting, or are there enough and varied data to make the explanations credible?

Perhaps it is time to move the focus of discussion from the promotion of certain types of research design and data collection to the construction of appropriate research questions and the identification and application of rigorous research criteria. Research in educational psychology deals with a wide range of issues, thus producing a wide range of research questions. Many of the critical questions in this field cannot be settled by universal prescriptions (Pajares 2007). They require examination of contextual variations. Therefore, to answer the diversity of questions, a range of different methods will be required.

Feuer et al. (2002: 7), citing the National Research Council’s report, identify a typology of commonly framed questions in educational and social research: ‘What is happening (description); is there a systematic effect (cause); and why or how is it happening (process or mechanism)?’ While each question can be answered by a range of methods, they poin...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Research methods in education
• Chapter 2 What is this lesson about?
• Chapter 3 Reading
• Chapter 4 Writing in the curriculum
• Chapter 5 The curriculum
• Chapter 6 How research in educational psychology has contributed to instructional procedures
• Chapter 7 Assessment and evaluation
• Chapter 8 Motivation, learning and instruction
• Chapter 9 Teacher expectations and beliefs
• Chapter 10 Managing classroom behaviour
• Chapter 11 Applied behaviour analysis
• Chapter 12 Reconceptualizing special education
• Chapter 13 Children’s friendships: real and imaginary
• Chapter 14 Atypical behaviour development
• Chapter 15 Family literacy practices and the promise of optimization
• Chapter 16 Societal and cultural perspectives through a Te Kotahitanga lens
• Chapter 17 Conclusion
• Index