I appreciate the comment about how the current discussion has opened various worm (and dinosaur) cans and would like to support the suggestion that some could be the basis for future discussions. I'd particularly appreciate one on the qualitative/quantitative debate.
In spite of scoring 0 out of 3 for being a quantitative researcher, a husband, or a white male, I am still nonPC and need to come back on the comments.
[quoting Tripp, 22 Oct 96.c] Do you know of the log-log law of practice?... Why do you doubt this?
Why do you assume that I doubt this? It would be more pertinent to say that I only accept this when I can be sure that all other things are equal but do not easily accept that they are in experimental settings designed to examine educational issues.
Let us assume that all my students found my experiment trivial and boring, which many may have. How do you account for the fact that the text group remembered more than the audio group?
I cannot say for sure, there are too many possibilities, e.g., it may be easier not to pay attention or to engage the brain when you are listening to something that does not interest you rather than reading it. It does not lead me to conclude that learning from text is more effective under any conditions.
[quoting Drake, 22 Oct 96] Your discrediting of experimental research in education is bothersome to me.
You and many others, I believe the debate has been ongoing for a longer time than I have worked in this field.
The use of "contrived" experiments is helpful to understand any complex phenomena because of the nature of the complexity.
I would not attempt to discredit experimental research, but I do believe that many important influences can be missed when you try to isolate a single variable. Particularly in educational terms where numbers have often been considered as more important than authentic conditions.
The alternative is to look at the entire learning picture at once. But you cannot look at the entire picture at once and produce generalizable results.
No, you cannot but you can produce grounded theory by examining different learning pictures and systematically analyzing results. There is an argument which says this is more truly generalizable than findings from one contrived situation.
I also believe that the ways that people learn (whether from instruction or otherwise) don't change at a fundamental level.
I don't believe we have discovered any such fundamentals (yet?), and there are opposing views on how this type of research should be approached.