HI Diane,
I see what you indexed below as not so much having to do with science, but having to do with the political side (ala Dewey) of education, i.e. education=votes=power. Granted, it seems the 'lay' understanding is that science (or is it math?) has a lot to do with measurement, and embedded in that belief is power -- the crafty political professional can exploit this belief, and the crafty proposal-writer can exploit it in turn, but some scientists (some of whom may also be proposal-writers) think of measurement as only one facet of a many-sided socially-organized endeavor. Case in point -- much botany has little to do with measurement. Not to mix apples and oranges here, of course.
I agree that there is a lot of education research that follows quantitative scripts (i.e. intervene and calculate the ANOVA) that makes things *appear* more scientific, and I can say I have not studied enough of these situations to draw conclusions that I feel can stand up to scrutiny. Yet what I know of many prominant scientists is that their focus has been on understanding something -- and the balance of quantitive and qualitative methods relied upon the questions they were asking.
One of the truely intruiguing philosophical criticisms of physical science -- quantum mechanics -- came out of a little paper by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935, and that still has not been resolved well despite a lot of attention in the last 20 years -- ironically, it has a lot to do with what measurement means.
The point being that the plethora of critique is what is valued in 'real science'.
bb
>and so on, as education is still quite enamored with 'that which can be
>measured' -
>a financial need, i suspect, to garner funding, in this world of Science =
>Money,
>social Sciences, such as education, benefit from portraying research in
>familiar scientific constructs. hence the absence of
>philosophico-analytical
>critiques, and the emphasis and interest in how units can be bordered and
>measured
>in contexts of performance results - etc.
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