Advice to Young Educational Researchers

Advice to Young Educational Researchers Gene V Glass Arizona State University (Circa 1992.)   Jim Popham carried a great idea away from a symposium at AERA in 1991 where Lee Shulman shared career-shaping advice with junior researchers; and Michael Kirst and Bill Russell recognized an idea worth supporting when they authorized this series of columns that present "guidelines for beginning educational researchers, developers, or evaluators" as seen by "senior members of the profession."          Following Jim's lead, I shall list my guidelines in bullet form. But, what follows are guidelines only in the sense that a question might guide. I have no simple answers to these questions. For Jim and myself and the others of our generation, these questions never arose; or if they did, the answers were presupposed and not debatable. I have a strong sense that today's "juniors" will have to answer them for themselves, and their individual success and the success of our larger enterprise will depend on the answers they give.    Questions that Junior Researchers Will Have to Answer.    1. With which intellectual tradition would I be wise to affiliate? The social sciences, as we have known them these many decades since the end of WW II? The tradition of "critique," as it evolved in Europe under the threat of nationalism and spread to American universities? Or none of these traditions at all?    2. Is the best inquiry basic? Is it theoretical; does it contribute to the elaboration of hypothetico-deductive theory-- law-giving and quantitative? Dare I generalize? (Cronbach, 1975, 1978) Or am I wasting my time chasing the current hot theory of cognitive mediation or role expectation? (Meehl, 1978, 1990).     3. Shall I choose to do my work primarily in a quantitative style or should I train myself in the qualitative tradition? Is the work that will most help schools that which is pursued with the experimenatlist's intent ("Do this and you shall enjoy this happy consequence.") or with the naturalist's intent ("This is what you are doing; this is what you believe.")?    4. How should I relate to the world of the practice of education? Should I do my research in the library and the laboratory and send my findings out to the world to be read and obeyed? Or shall I become a partner with teachers and educators, and let them guide me as I attempt to guide them?    5. Is all educational research political, and must I make political choices as a researcher? Or am I, as a seeker of the truth, apolitical and above the grubby squabbling of narrow interest groups? Or am I merely a part of another interest group? (Papagiannis, 1982)    6. Do our journals represent an obsolete form of narrow "careerism" that has little to do with the health of education but much to do with university personnel policies? Can I reach my true colleagues better through media other than the printed page? Should I write more to broaden my own grasp of education, my own understanding than to lay another tiny brick on the edifice of the Journal of Unread Research?         As senior members of our profession incidentally answer these questions in the coming issues, readers are well advised to remember to whom they are listening. To have been invited to offer advice to junior colleagues, older researchers had to succeed according to the norms of the profession as they were applied from about 1965 to about 1980. Hence, those whose advice you will read are primarily persons who believed that educational researchers are experimentalists working in the nomothetic tradition of the behavioral and social sciences (particularly, psychology), in the apolitical pursuit of truth that is recorded in the archival journals of educational research. In large part (Jim Popham being a noteworthy exception), they opposed what they saw as troubling alternative movements in AERA that sought to broaden the acceptance of qualitative research, practitioner- oriented endeavors such as evaluation and policy analysis, and political action (such as affirmative action and multi-culturalism in its many forms). As they read these slices of advice, junior researchers might well reflect on La Rochefoucauld's aphorism: "Old people like to give advice, as solace for no longer being able to provide bad examples." (1678, p.93)                                REFERENCES    Cronbach, L.J. (1975). Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology. American Psychologist, 30, 116-127.     Cronbach, L.J. (1978). Designing evaluations of educational and social programs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.     Meehl, P.E. (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. 46, 806-834.    Meehl, P.E. (1990). Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable. Psychological Reports. 66, 195-244.    Papagiannis, G.J., Klees, S.J., and Bickel, R.N. (1982). Toward a political economy of educational innovation. Review of  Educational Research, 52, 245-290.      Rochefoucauld (Francois duc de La) (1678) Paris: Reflections.