I find very little to argue with in Tom Reeves' paper--it is something that I have been grouching about and saying far less articulately than Tom for many years.
I believe that the reason for much of this socially irresponsible and sloppy research can be found within the system itself--the very culture of credentialism which has infected the academic world for many years but is now spreading out into schools, the professions and even the business world. Kindergarten teachers now need a M.Ed. in finger painting to be employed; a school principal needs a doctorate. Somebody wrote to me the other day with the throw-away line: "I'm writing a dissertation for my second doctorate on... "
Credentialism can be dangerous. We see its effect in the proliferation of people with bogus (and genuine) Diplomas in Psychology and Counseling who are riding the current therapy bandwagons, traumatizing patients and their families with revelations of "hidden memories" of incest and childhood abuse not to mention rape by aliens. The credence given to these stories comes from the letters after the name.
I treasure a card from a San Francisco shoe salesman inscribed:
Charles (Chuck) Ponsonby III, Ph.D.
Podiatric Fashion Consultant
Credentialism reflects the situation that education is now one of the most profitable leisure industries. In the USA I believe it still ranks below tourism but its growth in the past decade has outstripped prostitution. (Now there's a good Ph.D. topic for someone!)
Is credentialism a particularly American disease? There seems to be circumstantial evidence that it is more prevalent in the USA than most other English-speaking countries. You certainly see more business cards and e-mail signatures with the ubiquitous
Of course, Ph.D. also means something different here. In the British system a Ph.D. is a research degree, requiring (normally) three years of work towards a book-length thesis; doctorates by course work and 20,000 word dissertation are relatively recent inventions. It's hard to sustain a dissertation on "discourse in coffee shops" for three years and 250 pages!
Educational technology, as Tom points out, has been a particularly sore spot where pseudoscience research is concerned. The Clark-Kozma debate in the last two issues of Educational Technology Research & Development needs no elaboration, Clark let the dirty secret out of the closet back in 1982, although Wilbur Schramm had been saying it for years. Why does it continue? For a start, so-called "new educational technologies" seem to offer new opportunities in tired and overworked areas of research like learning theory and perception. Back in the 1920s experiments were conducted to see whether film (35mm movies) could teach better than "conventional" classroom instruction--no significant difference. And this fruitless line of pseudoresearch has continued unabated to the present day through slides, teaching machines, 16mm, television, computers, and interactive multimedia. I await the first papers comparing virtual reality experiences with "conventional instruction."
And it will continue for so long as it's necessary to have a Ph.D. to be a shoe salesman.