The head is now dried out and I'd like to take up some issues in rather more detail. Thanks particularly to Richard Hall for his very thoughtful remarks. I'm not addressing them in detail, mainly because I think we have quite different views about scientific objectivism. And, I don't want to stray too deeply into territory which Tom Reeves has already explored in detail. What I'd (modestly) like to try and do is undermine the very foundations of Steve's experiment.
A number of knees jerked at my throw-away comment about quantum mechanics and defenders of positivism and scientific objectivism were observed rushing to man the barricades. In reply to Lloyd, the Heisenberg herring was meant to be a (obviously unjustified) generalization about the well-known problem of scientific method that the very act of setting up the experiment can itself be an uncontrolled variable, double-blind methodology notwithstanding. Laboratory versus life, memory research versus "everyday cognitions" are real issues, so let's put the electrons back in the cupboard and think about education.
Richard Hall and Lloyd both raise the issue of Qualitative versus Quantitative research. Let's not stray too far into this dichotomy before admitting the terms are misleading--they are commonly used words for both the contrasting paradigms and the methods associated with them. Whichever paradigm you adhere to it is perfectly feasible to employ either qualitative or quantitative methods. Focusing on methods is like focusing on the symptoms rather than the disease. As David Fetterman (1988) put it, "methods are the manifestations of a manifold religion we call science" (p.5).
The qualitative and quantitative paradigms are cogently described by the linguist George Lakoff (1987) who preferred the terms scientific objectivism and scientific realism:
Scientific objectivism claims that there is only one fully correct way in which reality can correctly be divided up into objects. properties, and relations. Accordingly, the correct choice of objects is not a matter of choice of conceptual schemes: there is only one correct way to understand reality in terms of objects and categories of objects. Scientific realism, on the other hand, assumes that "the world is the way it is" while acknowledging that there can be more than one scientifically correct way of understanding reality in terms of conceptual schemes with different objects and categories of objects. (p.265)
I would assume that the methods which Steve Tripp describes are those commonly employed within the paradigm of scientific objectivism.
Robert Kozma (1994) described such methods as being similar to "examining the effects of a tornado by taking photographs before and after the event. The photographs enable us to assess the extent of the damage but not the process by which the damage was wrought." (As fine a metaphor for education as the truck/nutrition for media, don't you think!)
Steve has devised a situation (reading/listening), set it running (possibly left the room) and then tested the result. It's a "black box" model. I would contend that for teachers the only important question concerns what happened while the students were reading or listening--what happened inside the box.
The very paradigm of scientific objectivism makes the exercise irrelevant to the questions I want to ask: I don't want to prove that one "medium" is more effective than another--I want to find out how a learner creates her own reality through the medium. And, I won't learn this from a laboratory experiment in which I treat her as a white rat.
So I suppose you can conclude that my dominant paradigm is ethnographic, or realist. It's difficult to argue with Steve's and Richard Hall's conclusions because I don't believe that laboratory methods are capable of demonstrating anything I want to know.
By the way, Richard, I'm not alone in this. Let me refer you to a parallel and long-running debate closer to your field in memory research. Neisser (1978) (five years before Clark) attacked the laboratory approach that emphasizes internal over external validity and contended that nothing interesting or important had resulted from around 100 years of effort in the laboratory. I think the debate has been raging in American Psychologist for nearly 20 years now.
Another dilemma for the "media affect learning" advocates, as Steve, David Frampton and others have pointed out, is the very definition of the term "medium." The question has its parallels in the qualitative-quantitative argument: is the medium a physical object or a mental construct? Can we make a Saussurian distinction between "langue" and "paroles?"
Some of the most foolish and simplistic "experiments" in the sad tradition of educational technology in the 1960s concerned the comparison of film/video with "conventional instruction." We don't need to read film semiologists such as Metz or Wollen to realize that the "language" of film/video is extraordinarily complex. Baggaley (1980) demonstrated that even subtle differences of camera angle can have profound effects on perception. The only way comprehensively to define the "medium" of film is to describe its physical composition (celluloid, sprockets, etc.) and the likelihood that you are watching it while sitting in the dark. Even structural and narrative elements such as mise-en-scene and montage were broken down in the 1960s by the concerted attacks of the French new wave and New York minimalists like Warhol.
Human Computer Interface studies have equally demonstrated that to describe the computer screen as a "medium" is to describe no more than illuminated glass and plastic and the fact that you are probably sitting on a chair with lights on. Dare I go so far as to corrupt Salomon and suggest that the "invested emotional effort" which Macintosh users put into their medium would probably be enough to skew any results obtained using a PC?
So my position is that the whole medium/learning argument is irrelevant. It's like the old story of five blind men trying to describe an elephant. Media are tools which some use like a hammer and others like a violin, and that goes for learners as well as teachers. Our proper subject of study should be the way in which skilled users go about it and the problems which poor users experience while trying to do so.
Baggaley, J. (1980). Psychology of the TV image. Westmead: Gower.
Fetterman, D.M. (1988). Ethnographic educational evaluation. In D.M. Fetterman (Ed.), Qualitative approaches to evaluation in education. New York: Praeger.
Kozma, R.B. (1994). Will media influence learning? Reframing the debate. Educational Technology Research & Development, 42(2), 7-19.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Neisser, U. (1978). Memory: what are the important questions? In M.M. Gruneberg, P.E. Morris, & R.N. Sykes (Eds.), Practical aspects of memory (pp. 3-24). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.