The Importance of Educational Research

Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0

Research in fields related to social sciences, in my understanding, has several problems: These include the dependence on the specific context in which studies are conducted and generational changes, which can render the results of previous research obsolete.

When choosing a sample for a practical experiment, it is really complicated to have a universal one, due to how different we humans are in many aspects: ideology, interests, culture, economic situation, political stance, religion… We could say that there are practically as many different thoughts as there are human beings. Therefore, in any social research, it is complicated to reach conclusions that are not restricted to a specific context. They are even restricted to a specific moment, if we take into account the generational, economic, political, and evolutionary changes (as far as thinking is concerned) that we have as a species.

I believe these are some of the reasons why teachers are sometimes not up to date with advances in educational research. With the explosion of new methodologies that can be applied in the classroom in recent years (many recycled versions of methodologies already used many years ago¹), one can feel overwhelmed by the lack of knowledge about what is best for their students. If one delves deeper, one will conclude that there is no magic methodology and that the best thing is to adapt to the human group we have in front of us. And what does that mean? How do I adapt to a group I know almost nothing about at first? How do I know what will work best if the person who teaches the class, designs the evaluation instrument, and corrects it is the same? In the end, in many cases, one ends up relying on experience and intuition². So, how does this impact the advancement of research in this field?

The reader may think after reading the above that this is a pessimistic manifesto against research in social sciences. And nothing could be further from the truth. These aspects are precisely part of its strength, because they justify that research should be constant and numerous, allowing us to draw conclusions applicable to our context. Besides, how boring would it be if it didn’t change over time, a sign that we wouldn’t change as a society.

I believe, therefore, that in schools it is essential to apply action research³. It’s about making a small effort to provide our innovation projects in the classroom with a research framework⁴. It would be ideal to have researcher-teacher alliances that would allow us to better design these projects, accompany us in the interpretation of data, and make it possible for the conclusions to be peer-reviewed so that they can be confirmed or refuted and finally published openly.

It’s no longer about developing a project, designing a methodology, or implementing a tool and promoting it as the next educational panacea⁵, but about doing a serious analysis, with positive and negative conclusions, being honest about the advantages and disadvantages. This will improve that intuition gained from experience and keep it freer from biases, which will directly impact the quality of education we are providing. For this, it is essential to replicate studies in different centers with different contexts (the more, the better), using control groups formed by half of the target students from each of them to have sufficiently representative samples and avoid researcher bias.

Another direct consequence is that other researchers will be able to use all this data to analyze it (secondary analysis⁶) and reach more general conclusions, in the ongoing quest for universal principles. As an example, I want to recommend the book by Héctor Ruiz Martín, ¿Cómo aprendemos? Una aproximación científica al aprendizaje y la enseñanza (How We Learn: A Scientific Approach to Learning and Teaching), in which he starts from multiple scientific studies to summarize what we currently know about how the brain learns within the field of cognitive psychology. These summaries are concretized in effective study strategies that he clearly reflects in his new book aimed at students, Conoce tu cerebro para aprender a aprender (Know Your Brain to Learn How to Learn). Similarly, Pedro de Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, and Casper D. Hulshof debunk the myths we usually find in education in their books Urban Myths about Learning and Education and More Urban Myths about Learning and Education. Books that, by the way, would be very good to have translated into Spanish. The article 12 Educational Research Myths by John Dabell summarizes some of those most widespread educational myths.

Let’s then do more action research in the classroom, optimize the development of our educational experience and intuition, collaborate with agents who have contexts similar to ours, contribute our grain of sand to macro-studies that allow the publication of popular science books, apply the conclusions of these books in our day-to-day classroom and… Start over again.