Educational Research

Much as I long to turn my back on all the educational claptrap, there are times when the BS is just so outrageous – so egregious – that I have to pause and comment. It’s like wanting to say ‘to hell with the anti-vax lot, there’s nothing we can do for them’ – and then coming across someone who is systematically indoctrinating their children in the same philosophy and calling it ‘science’.

One particularly frustrating situation I encounter is self-serving educational research: i.e. research which justifies conventional educational practices on the grounds of evidence which implicitly contains the very assumptions that scientific method should challenge. To picture what I’m saying, imagine a company that makes hammers assessing an iPhone and concluding ‘well, it’s not very good at knocking in nails!’

How does this apply to educational research? When I read educational research, I often start by quickly scanning to the point where they describe how they assess the effectiveness of a given approach. At the point where I find that this is primarily ‘factual recall’ (such as PISA tests offer) I realise that the research is worthless, and is merely an exercise in justifying existing (commercial) interests, via a set of hidden assumptions.

‘How are you able to make such a sweeping statement?’ you may well ask.

Well – what is learning?

Consider for a moment that in the entire history of humankind, the educational practice of memorising facts from something one has read and then regurgitating them in a test, is a tiny fraction of our history. It’s a bizarre ritual. It’s been around less time than palmistry. Whatever it is and isn’t, it’s safe to say that human cognition – human learning – was not designed/evolved for this purpose. Whatever learning is (and I’m not going to try and persuade you of what it is here) it’s not memorising stuff that you’ve read and regurgitating it in a test.

Another tack: my dog (if I had one) would do poorly on PISA tests. So does a chimpanzee. Although humans love to imagine that we are special - neurologically speaking we are not that different from either of these creatures – we have very similar brain structures to chimps for example. Until a few thousand years ago and the advent of a whole range of new cultural practices, we were also wandering around with sticks trying to survive. Yes, we do language very well – other creatures do language well. Despite having iPhones, we use the same cognitive systems to learn – we’ve just forced them to do something they weren’t designed to do.

So – setting aside the theoretical baggage, a great way to answer the question ‘so how SHOULD we assess learning?’ is to start with ‘how would you measure a chimp’s learning?’ Ok - probably not with PISA tests. Probably you would say something like ‘well, we’d look at their behaviour – what they can do.’ And this is pretty much the answer (in fact in How People Learn I define learning as ‘a change in capability or behaviour as a result of memory’). This is how learning generally IS assessed in comparative psychology. 

So there’s your answer: we should only be considering research where what is measured is a change in capability or behaviour, that we can attribute to memory. There are no hidden assumptions in that proposal. It doesn’t secretly say ‘learning is schooling’. We shouldn't subvert that ambition by tacitly making 'the change in capability' a test paper - that's just smuggling education into the research.

‘But what about exams? What about testing?’ people may react ‘Aren’t they important?’. Well they are if what you are really trying to do is surreptitiously trying to provide a justification for an entire industry based around delivery of stuff that doesn't work.

We are facing a more profound societal challenge right now for precisely this reason: education has tended to consider ‘learning’ as a process resulting in factual recall, where employers want people who actually have capabilities. The gap between ‘learning’ (i.e. education) and learning is widening. People who have ‘learned’ something have often not learned to do anything (except pass tests). If we could just stop churning out research that conflates ‘learning’ with factual recall and instead focus on learning – i.e. how we change behaviour and capability - we’d be able to make progress.

Image: @ruben18rodriguez