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The federal initiative, NCLB, includes guidelines about educational research methodology as well as school practices ("No Child Left Behind Act," p. 532). The law states that reforms and school practices should be based on scientifically based research (SBR). SBR is mentioned over 100 times in NCLB (A. Smith, 2003, p. 126). Next to the strong emphasis on dis-aggregation of test scores, NCLB’s reference to SBR has spawned the next most frequent number of responses in the literature (Viadero, 2004). Educational researchers spend time “fighting these designs when they are inappropriate or irrelevant, which is often the case” (Eisenhart, 2005, p. 246). In response to the NCLB SBR mandate, the National Research Council (2002) published a report, Scientific Research in Education (SRE), addressing the question of the meaning of SBR. On the NCLB website, the U.S. Department of Education explains that “scientifically based research means there is reliable evidence that the program or practice works ” (n.d.). The explanation includes a reference to experimental study involving an experiment/control group. The report states that requiring SBR “moves the testing of educational practices toward the medical model used by scientists to assess the effectiveness of medications, therapies and the like” (A. Smith, 2003, p. 126). The strong emphasis on SBR leads one to the conclusion that forms of research that do not conform to SBR are invalid (Mayer, 2006, Winter, p. 8). Having the federal government legislate SBR is unusual and can be interpreted to have political overtones. Howe (2005) explains that research methodology is “unavoidably political by virtue of adopting certain aims, employing certain kinds of vocabularies and theories, and providing certain people the opportunity to be (or not to be) heard (p. 321).” It has been suggested that SBR was mandated to improve the credibility of educational research and thus to increase the likelihood of continued funding of education research (Odom et al., 2005, p. 144). Another possible reason for including the SBR requirement may have been to force educational researchers to focus research on programs that are known to improve student achievement, thus reducing the achievement gap. Reducing the achievement gap is morally correct; however, the SBR requirement may actually create a research gap. Some research questions regarding the achievement gap do not lend themselves well to SBR, leaving them unanswered. This paper reviews possible rationales for the SBR requirement, sources of possible variation not accounted for in SBR studies, and examples of non SBR research that have had major impact in the field of education. The SBR relationship between educational and medical research, as well as between multiple research methodologies brings the recommendation: The reauthorization of NCLB should embrace the reality that research questions alone should determine the research methodology, leaving no research methodology behind. - See more at: http://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v3n6.htm#sthash.mqNw2oab.dpuf |
