The Problem of Accumulating Knowledge in Education Research

• In Event: “Professional Language” in Education: Enhancing Communication Within and Across Research, Teacher Education, and School Settings

Abstract

Objectives

Dreeben (2005) notes: “If one had to choose a single criterion to identify a profession, it would be a practice based on a learned body of knowledge” (p. 51). This begs the question of what that “learned body of knowledge” is in education, and why, as researchers, we seem incapable of creating knowledge that accumulates over contexts and time. Incentives are strong to coin new terms, and yet there are consequences for this terminological laxity. As scholars, we undermine ourselves: failing to develop knowledge that builds over time, thereby degrading our purchase on policy and practice, and weakening our claims as an efficacious community of professionals. I hope to issue a call to ourselves, as scholars, to consider the larger endeavor to which we all belong, and to weigh carefully the consequences of the language we use.

Methods, Evidence, and Conclusions

This theoretical argument stems from several long-standing reviews of the literatures of teaching and teacher education (e.g., Author, 2005; Author, 2008), and my work identifying the “core practices” of ELA instruction (Author, 2008). From this work, I have identified a perennial problem that we, as researchers, perpetuate: we commonly give new names to—or find new, idiosyncratic uses for—constructs extant in the literature, thereby reinventing the wheel across communities and generations of research. For example, "the work on uptake in classroom discourse (Nystrand et al., 1996), developed within the field of English education, is rarely cited by researchers in math education, even as the work on discourse in math classrooms (cf. Lampert & Blunk, 1998) is generally overlooked by researchers in literacy" (Author, 2008).

As a consequence, we fail to develop accumulative knowledge around certain core educational constructs, such as “uptake.” Of course, even terms that we take as consensual, such as “discussion,” can be interpreted in idiosyncratic ways, thereby “making it nearly impossible to compare findings” (Author, 2008). Our research communities are like ships passing in the night, with little to no accumulative knowledge around a shared set of consensual constructs.

We lose knowledge across content domains, and we lose knowledge over time. For example, I argue that work on “mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT)” (Ball & Bass, 2003) takes an existing construct, “pedagogical content knowledge (PCK)” (Shulman, 1986), and essentially gives it a new name. I maintain that MKT and PCK are fundamentally the same construct—and by giving MKT a new label, we fracture, rather than unite, the knowledge base on PCK. This begs the question: What are the consequences, in terms of our efficacy as scholars, of the endless proliferation of terms in education research—and what justifies coining a new one?

Significance

Our terminological inconsistency erodes our ability to develop the “learned body of knowledge” essential to professions (Dreeben, 2005). A common technical vocabulary—particularly among researchers in the fields of teaching and teacher education—can unite our disparate research communities around a core set of consensual constructs, which, one would hope, could inform, and be informed by, the field.

Author

• Pamela L. Grossman, Stanford University