[quoting Hart, 23 Mar 97] What's going on here? Who is allowing this poor research to flourish? Who is publishing it? Who is supervising it? Who is laying down the requirement that research is the only way to earn a university degree?
Unfortunately most graduate students don't engage in research early enough in their programs to know what they want to do for their dissertation. It is by doing research that you learn what a good question is, and what confounding variables are. Then, by the time they get to the dissertation, they are in a hurry, and are victim to poor logistics (even if they do have good questions). It is increasingly difficult to get good populations, and enough treatment time for adequate chance for independent variables to produce differences. Studies embedded in classes (courses) where the achievement motive drives out other sources of variance, are also a problem for "authentic" learning research. Add university "human subjects" committees (who want you to prove why your treatment of one group won't put another group at a disadvantage), and you have a very real problem.
Maybe things are better at other universities--I'd like to know.