OLDaily

Is educational research evidence-based?
Martyn Hammersley, BERA Blog, 2020/04/29

Martyn Hammersley points to a key issue in educational research: "no empirical facts can, on their own, provide sufficient support for practical evaluations and recommendations, since these necessarily involve value assumptions." That's why it's so hard to think of educational practices as being purely "resaearch based". This serves merely to disguise the values and presumptions behind the assertions being made about learning and development. At best, what research supports is a set of conditional statements: if you want to achieve this outcome, then this is shown to be effective (or not, as it were).

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College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It.
Christina Paxson, New York Times, 2020/04/29

Christina Paxson's letter to the Times described a classic case of being between a rock and a hard place. The president of Brown University, she describes the rock quite efficiently: "The basic business model for most colleges and universities is simple — tuition comes due twice a year... remaining closed in the fall means losing as much as half of our revenue. This loss, only a part of which might be recouped through online courses, would be catastrophic." The hard place is figuring out how to open the university during a pandemic. Her answer is a mixture of regular testing, an app that tracks movements, and segregation facilities for those who test positive. It's hard to imagine even such measures working in an environment of shared accommodation, common eating facilities, and densely packed classrooms. She even says "Traditional aspects of collegiate life - athletic competitions, concerts and yes, parties - may occur." Hard to believe.

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9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (And If) They Reopen
Anya Kamanetz, 2020/04/29

One way of predicting the future is to take something that's reasonably easy to predict - for example, that physical distancing policies will continue into the fall - and then mapping the consequences. Here's how Anya Kamanetz's wrote this up:

• Stepped-up health and hygiene measures
• Class sizes of 12 or fewer (and therefore) staggered schedules
• Younger kids first? New calendars
• Different attendance policies
• No assemblies, sports games or parent-teacher conferences
• Remote learning continues
• Social, emotional and practical help for kids

All of this makes sense. One wonders, however, how equitably it will be applied. Will we really see the money spend and accommodations made to support 12-student class sizes in impoverished school districts?

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