Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Experiment's persistent failure in education inquiry, and why it keeps failing

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The argument here - and I agree with it - is that "we haven't as a community of inquiry learned the lessons of the past, and the putative improvement and purification of the experiment form is once again leaving us disappointed." The idea of the 'experiment' in education has ossified around the model of 'a comparison of groups', and this model has time and again failed to yield useful results. What follows in this article is a comprehensive and thorough presentation of the argument, including a detailed deconstruction of what proponents of the experimental form deem to be a 'true' experiment. But these are "as vulnerable to distortion as any other kind of research." Ultimately, "this model of intervene‐and‐test using the protocols of a particular kind of experiment is, in education, flawed, unable to meet this branch of experimentation's own design expectations and unwilling to take seriously the significance of confounders which vitiate the legitimacy of its findings." Image: Vox.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Nov 21, 2024 2:38 p.m.

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