[quoting Reeves, 22 Oct 96] It is difficult to argue with those who write in terms of their approach being foolproof or infallible.
Tom, relax. My references to TRUTH and winning, etc., were meant to be a little ironic.
Science is not mathematics. It does not provide us with certainty, but that does not mean it is useless. My car doesn't float or fly, but it still serves me pretty well.
I do not believe that the results of my experiment, or any experiment, are conclusive, but we, as poor humans, are forced to act in this uncertain world based on the best evidence we have. I believe that my evidence, combined with Furnham and Gunter's, provides good reason to believe that people learn factual information better from text than from audio. This is not ironclad, but it is about as good as humans can hope for.
Has anyone noticed that there is distinct contrast between the advocacy of experimental methods by educational researchers such as Steve and the critique of these methods by contemporary philosophers of science?
Richard Feynman, in one of his lectures I mentioned in a previous posting, complains that most philosophers of science don't really understand real science. Science need not be perfect to be useful.
Phillips (1987) remarks on this irony, "New approaches to the design of evaluations of educational and social programs are being formulated that make the 'true experiment' seem like a lumbering dinosaur, yet some folk persist in thinking that dinosaurs are wonderful creatures" (p. viii).
Do you mean to assert that Phillips has shown objectively and absolutely that the old methods are wrong??? If not, what is your complaint?
I agree in the sense that if we ran lots of experiments like Steve's and came up with the same results, we would be able to say that print is more effective for learning than audio PROVIDED THE CONDITIONS WERE THE SAME. However, as others have noted during this discussion ... it is these conditions that make all the difference.
But the conditions in my experiment and Furnham and Gunter's were different, and the results were the same.
Print is better than audio!?? Under what circumstances? For which tasks? And how does this "law" (print > audio) interact with individual differences such as intelligence, metacognitive ability, field dependence/independence, locus of control, culture, sex, age, visual and aural acuity, learning styles, analytic/relational skills, anxiety, tolerance for ambiguity, motivation, risk taking, prior experience, interests, attitudes, and disabilities? And what about our objectives? Are we teaching facts, skills, rules, schema, mental models, problem-solving, or creativity?
Interesting questions, all. And all would make good thesis material. Provided someone like Steve Tripp is brave enough to question the establishment position in the first place!!!
Chaos theory (cf., Gleick , 1987) indicates that even relatively simple physical systems such as weather are impossible to "determine" because of the complexity of the variables involved and the sensitivity of the interactions of these variables to small differences in initial conditions. If this is true of weather, can we really imagine (as positivists do) that we can ultimately determine which media are best for learning when the phenomenon of interest is as complex as human learning?
Meteorologists have quite complex understandings of the mechanisms underlying weather. What they cannot predict exactly is what will happen here tomorrow. They can however make statistically valid predictions.
Education is the same. We can understand what generally happens in certain situations. We cannot predict what Mary will learn tomorrow.
So what? We do the best we can, given the limits of our understanding.
(By the way, even dealing with the physical and biological sciences, Kuhn rejected the notion that as science progresses, we move closer and closer to "truth."
Kuhn is wrong on this one. Plainly we have a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of nature than we did 200 years ago? Shall I mention DNA?
The empirical methods of positivists like Steve work well within the carefully controlled contexts of their experiments, but their results do little to help us change anything worth changing.
What are you suggesting to use in their place? Seems like controlled experiments on vision allow the local store to provide me with glasses that make my work easier. By what standard is that not "worth changing?" Try working without glasses for a while, if you are so opposed to experiments.
About Logical Positivism: A philosophy deriving from Wittgenstein (who later abandoned it). Basically, logical positivism said knowledge should be based on observable experience and expressed in a logical language. The logical part suffered a blow when Goedel showed that there was knowledge that we have that cannot be expressed in a logical language. This shows that logic is not perfect, but only at the extremes. It still works for most stuff.
Positivism simply says that theories should explain (be based on) the results of experiments. We can never know if the results of experiments 'correspond' to reality, but most of us act as if they do. Einstein was a realist, by the way. He believed that the results of experiments corresponded to reality. I am officially more skeptical than that.
I think this kind of argument is not too interesting. It is usually a sign that you have no good research ideas. People in fields that are making good progress usually don't worry about philosophy too much.