Cause & Effect

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Chapter 7, p. 161 talks about education research. The current research climate is effective in finding correlations, but not in causality. A better approach, the authors say, is to understand individual students in different circumstances.



But: Maybe we are looking at the wrong constructs, or through the wrong lenses?

It's ironic that the authors want to try to understand individuals but they use a scientific method to do this. A method that doesn't allow these individuals to TELL their individual stories.
Quantitative methods only place people as numbers, objects. Their stories--the things that we can use to understand why they do what they do, what they want to accomplish, what problems they are having--those go unnoted.

Qualitative methods like phenomenology would allow resaerchers to study aspects of one 'problem' that is going on in education. They can then see all the parts, understand the inner workings, and allow the individuals involved a voice.
The authors put a lot of stress on causality. But there are some things--especially when dealing with people and politics--that do not follow a predicatable casue-and-effect line. The more we try to predict people's behavior, the more we might be wrong about those predictions.

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. But--Why are we FISHING?" That's what my professor Ian Baptiste asks. Why are we only staying with the type of educational research methods we've always been using--and then wondering why things aren't working?