The scalpel model of educational research

Abstract

Many years ago, the late internationally renowned UK educationist, Harvey Goldstein, gave a thrilling keynote lecture on assessment. He calmly, politely, andwith surgical skill, wielded his intellectual scalpel with dazzling flashes of compelling brilliance, dissecting out and demolishing the then UK government’s policy on assessment in UK schools. It was a model of its kind. He set out, analysed, evaluated, critiqued, and judged the policy. He exposed its assumptions, aporias, and underlying ideology, implications, and consequences, drawing on a range of research evidence, weighing up its pros and cons, and leaving it all in ruins on the dissecting table, to the delight and spontaneous applause of the audience. Working like a filigree jeweller, he exposed it for what it was: dogma wrapped up in high-sounding, pejorative phrases. His forecast of consequences came true. By taking a sober, cool, unemotional, dispassionate, careful, perfectly paced, and measured analysis, he enabled his scalpel to do its work, step by step, and it worked wonders. There were no histrionics or one-sided statements. Instead, he let the argument speak for itself. In Habermasian style, the unforced force of the argument prevailed, drawing on a wealth of research evidence where relevant, generating light rather than the heat of a furnace of emotional noise, and persuading by the force of the argument alone, not its temperature. The deeper that Goldstein went into his analysis, the clearer it became that here was a topic – assessment in UK schools – whose features were complex rather than simple, unstraightforward rather than easily understood, multitextured, multidimensional, and multilevelled, a contested ideological terrain in many dimensions and levels, and not to be taken at face value. His analysis was an example par excellence of how researchers in education should operate, indicating not only that they have a duty to expose and unravel the complexity of an issue but also how to do it. The four papers in this issue illustrate the importance of researchers in education opening up and analysing their fields closely and carefully, exposing the complexities of the issues with which they are working, what their evidence suggests, and what are the boundaries of what can be taken from their research. This is their task, whatever fields of focus, methodologies, and methods they employ. For example, in this issue, Cunningham, Gorman, and Maher report action research using observational approaches to study student engagement, noting that “student engagement is a multidimensional and complex phenomenon”, and they indicate the limits of their research as being “too small to draw conclusive conclusions”. Kim and Lee, using survey data from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, conduct multilevel regression analysis to measure teacher effectiveness. They employ a value-added model that moves beyond averages and takes account of variance in teachers, in the name of equity in recognising differences amongst students. They are careful to include “limitations and caveats”, and they recognise the “limitations regarding the instrument for measuring teaching practices for educational equity”.