RESEARCH and PRACTICE: Universities and Schools

Gene Glass  
Nelle Moore

Division of Leadership  Policy Studies
College of Education
Arizona State University

(Gist of a talk presented to the Arizona Educational Research
   Organization at its Second Annual Meeting, 20 October 1989.)

Thesis: The Universities, through their efforts in research and
scholarship, do not contribute materially to the practice of
education. The soft social sciences (social psychology,
behavioral psychology, clinical psychology, sociology and the
like) are incapable of significantly advancing the practice of
the minor professions (teaching, social work, counseling, and
nursing, to name a few). The schools hope that the universities
will advance knowledge and make discoveries that will solve
education's problems is a vain hope.

 One of us believed what will be said here today in 1972 when
he read the following remarks made by the philosopher of science
Thomas Kuhn: "I'm not sure that there can now be such a thing as
really productive educational research. It is not clear that one
yet has the conceptual research categories, research tools, and
properly selected problems that will lead to increased
understanding of the educational process. There is a general
assumption that if you've got a big problem, the way to solve it
is by the application of science. All you have to do is call on
the right people and put enough money in and in a matter of a few
years, you will have it. But it doesn't work that way, and it
never will." (Quoted in Dershimer, 1970, p.79.) This belief was
given an intellectual foundation by Paul Meehl's classic "Two
Knights" paper in 1978, in which he enumerated twenty reasons why
fields like educational research do not make progress. After
thirty years in the academic world, one of us now believes this
thesis even more confidently, because he has seen how the culture
of the research university molds its faculty into researchers who
have little hope of improving the practice of education.

 The wide gulf between research and practice arises from two
sources, basically: the near impossibility of productive
elucidatory inquiry on the practice of schooling and the culture
of universities in which the minor professions have had to
subjugate themselves (intellectually and professionally) to the
social and behavioral sciences. Let's examine each source in
turn.

Why Soft Science Doesn't Progress.

 Two scholars stand like lamp-posts illuminating the path we
walk. Paul Meehl and Lee Cronbach's contributions to our thinking
about the problems of research in the soft sciences go back over
thirty years to their collaboration on the construct validity of
tests. Though they never collaborated again to our knowledge, in
recent years their assessment of the scientific enterprise in the
soft social sciences, and in education, have converged on a sort
of doom that the profession largely wishes to ignore.

 Lee Cronbach spoke on "Prudent Aspirations for Social
Inquiry" on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the
dedication of the Social Science Research Building at the
University of Chicago in December of 1979: "The profession is
proud of much work old and new and of the influence social
inquiry has had, yet is troubled that little theory cumulates and
distressed that many recommended practical actions fail. The
persons most disappointed are the ones in the profession and in
the world of action who hoped that our conclusions would directly
indicate what social policy should be. Findings of social science
can rarely or never identify 'right' courses of action.
Fortunately, today's profession is coming to see the rationalist,
scientistic ideal as no more than an infantile dream of
omnipotence. The present mood, one hopes, bespeaks an institution
on the brink of adulthood, ready to claim a role within its
capabilities and aware that waiting for its Newton is as
pointless as waiting for Godot." (p.61)

 Elucidatory inquiry ("science") on education runs aground of
a host of difficulties that have daunted attempts to control and
predict human enterprises. The record of success in these areas
(the sciences of the artificial, to use Herbert Simon's phrase)
has not been good. Our attempts to build a scientific basis for
technical advancement of education encounter the following
problems, according to Meehl: the difficulty of slicing and
naming the raw behavioral flux, problems of naming situations,
open constructs, individual differences in response, the absence
of meaningful units of measure, divergent causality, unknown
critical events, nuisance variables, feedback loops,
autocatalytic processes, essentially random influences, the sheer
number of variables affecting behavior, culture, intentionality,
and the uniqueness of context. There is scant cause for optimism
about the scientific enterprise in education. Related fields
(nursing, social work, counseling, law enforcement) have no great
successes to point to for encouragement. The idea that
universities will discover knowledge that practitioners will
apply dies hard, but its demise is certain.

There is a sense in which research  scholarship  science shape
practice in education, but only very remotely and over decades;
this happens through the creation and promulgation of metaphors
and images that are taken up as popular knowledge and then guide
action. But we do not speak of this interpretation here since it
is not the sense of research into practice that practitioners
expect; they expect to read directions in the form of
propositions on what to do to make things better. (Glass,
Cronbach, Lakoff  Johnson).



What Universities Do to Education Faculty.

 The point that must be made here is that professional school
faculty in the modern American university are pressured to adopt
a style of research that stands little chance of contributing to
improved practice. The pressure is exerted primarily at the
points when faculty stand for tenure and for promotion to "full";
and it is applied by faculty in the social and behavioral
sciences. One of us has sat on faculty promotion and tenure
committees in three different universities for a quarter century.
The experience has been absolutely the same in every place and at
all times. Sooner or later, before an aspirant for tenure is
granted the prize, that person's "papers" (it is assumed that
what a person contributes can be captured in print) must pass a
committee of faculty from throughout the university. Engineers
are sometimes loathe to judge artists, and historians
occasionally demur when the candidate's accomplishments disappear
into some uncharted recess of the atom; but the social sciences
speak with authority when the case before the committee comes
from one of the minor professions--indeed, some psychologists,
economists and what-have-you virtually regard professions as
little more than arenas for the application of social science
knowledge. The record of publishing that one must present to win
this group's approval is one of several short (six to ten printed
pages), empirical reports of experiments or surveys; if the topic
of the works changes too frequently the work is said to be "not
programmatic," a barbed indictment for which the candidate may
not be able to advance an adequate defence. This entire sub-
culture of brief, written research reports in archival journals
reveals the concept of inquiry which its guardians hold.
Knowledge is established through a series of well-controlled
empirical forays and is packaged in the form of verbal
propositions which are general and last forever: "Do A when
confronted with circumstances X and desirous of achieving state
Alpha; do B in case of Y." Much has been written in our
professional house organs in recent years about the historical
origins of this particular view of the world and inquiry into it;
suffice it to say that this simplified perspective on knowledge
discovery and use is under withering attack everywhere and loses
defenders almost daily. Kenneth Prewitt, in testimony to the
House Subcommittee on Science, Research and Technology (Items,
Vol. 34, No. 1, March 1980, pp.1-4), spoke of the diminished
aspirations of the contemporary social sciences: "The complexity
of the problems for which the social and behavioral sciences
might be helpful are always going to be one step ahead of the
problem-solving abilities of those sciences.... They are sciences
whose progress is marked, and whose useful is measured, less by
the achievement of consensus or the solving of problems than by a
refinement of debate and a sharpening of the intelligence upon
which collective management of human affairs depends." (p. 3)

 The reasons why professional school faculty are subjected to
this influence stem from the history of the development of the
professions and the universities in this country. Researchers and
scholars in Europe, for example, do not suffer as greatly the
unhelpful influence of the norms that prevail in American
universities. I shall spend a little time recapping this history.

 The pressures which education faculty feel as members of
both a profession and an academic community have their roots in
the circumstances surrounding the rise of the large state
universities in the United States around the turn of the century.
It is important that we understand these circumstances and how
they predisposed professional schools to be what they are,
otherwise we--university-affiliated researchers on the one hand
and practicing educators on the other--will continue to attribute
stupidity and malevolence to each other as the causes of our
inability to talk to and help each other. We can not do better in
sketching this historical account than to quote Donald Schon at
length and verbatim from his book The Reflective Practitioner
(1983); indeed we shall quite him at such length as to be
unseemly were it not that we are receiving no pay to give this
talk and Schon might sell a couple of books if you are convinced
by these words that he has written something worth reading
further:

 "In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the
professions of engineering and medicine achieved dramatic
successes in reliably adjusting means to ends and became models
of instrumental practice.  The engineer's design and analysis of
materials and artifacts, the physician's diagnosis and treatment
of disease, became prototypes of the science-based, technical
practice which was destined to supplant craft and artistry.  For
according to the Positivist epistemology of practice, craft and
artistry had no lasting place in rigorous practical knowledge.

 "Universities came of age in the United States, assumed
their now familiar structure and styles of operation, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when science and
technology were on the rise and the intellectual hegemony of
Positivism was beginning to be established.  Although other
traditions of thought were never wholly extinguished in American
universities--indeed, in some places managed to preserve a kind
of local dominance--nevertheless, in the United States more than
in any other nation except Germany, the very heart of the
university was given over to the scientific enterprise, to the
ethos of the Technological Program, and to Positivism.

 "Indeed, it was from the Germanic tradition, carried to the
United States after the Civil War by young American graduates of
the German universities, that the new concept of the university
as a multidisciplinary research institution took root in the
United States, first in Johns Hopkins University, the founding of
which was "perhaps the most decisive single event in the history
of learning in the Western hemisphere."34  And it was from the
model of Johns Hopkins that other universities began to mold
themselves around the German ideal and to manifest, as Edward
Shils has written,

     a drift of opinion [toward]. . .the appreciation of
     knowledge, particularly knowledge of a scientific
     character.  There was general agreement that knowledge
     could be accepted as knowledge only if it rested on
     empirical evidence, rigorously criticized and
     rationally analyzed. . .The knowledge which was
     appreciated was secular knowledge which continued the
     mission of sacred knowledge complemented it, led to it,
     or replaced it; fundamental, systematically acquired
     knowledge was thought in some way to be a step toward
     redemption.  This kind of knowledge held out the
     prospect of the transfiguration of life by improving
     man's control over the resources of nature and over the
     powers that weaken his body; it offered the prospect of
     better understanding of society which was thought would
     lead to the improvement of society.35

"With the coming of the new model of the university, the
Positivist epistemology found expression in normative ideas about
the proper division of labor between the university and the
professions.  As Thorsten Veblen argued in The Higher Learning in
America, 'The difference between the modern university and the
lower and professional schools is broad and simple; not so much a
difference of degree as of kind.'36 The universities have a
higher mission to "fit men for a life of science and scholarship;
and [they are] accordingly concerned with such discipline only as
they will give efficiency in the pursuit of knowledge"; whereas
the lower schools are occupied with 'instilling such knowledge
and habits as will make their pupils fit citizens of the world in
whatever position in the fabric of workday life they may fall.'37
The proper relation between the higher and lower schools is one
of separation and exchange.  Quite simply, the professions are to
give their practical problems to the university, and the
university, the unique source of research, is to give back to the
professions the new scientific knowledge which it will be their
business to apply and test.  Under no conditions are the
technical men of the lower schools to be allowed into the
university, for this would put them in a false position

     which unavoidably leads them to court a specious
     appearance of scholarship and so to invest their
     technological discipline with a degree of pedantry and
     sophistication; whereby it is hoped to give these
     schools and their work some scientific and scholarly
     prestige.38

"Veblen's battle was, of course, quixotic.  The evils against
which he railed at the University of Chicago in 1916 were
harbingers of a general trend.  The survival-oriented interests
of the professions reinforced the interest of university boards
of governors in appropriating schools of useful knowledge.  The
professions did enter the new universities, in increasing
numbers, until by 1963 Bernard Barber could write in Daedalus
that 'nearly all the well-established professions are located in
the universities.'39

 "But for this, the professionalizing occupations paid a
price.  They had to accept the Positivist epistemology of
practice which was now built into the very tissue of the
universities.  And they had also to accept the fundamental
division of labor on which Veblen had placed so great an
emphasis.  It was to be the business of university-based
scientists and scholars to create the fundamental theory which
professionals and technicians would apply to practice.  The
function of the professional school would be


     the transmission to its students of the generalized and
     systematic knowledge that is the basis of professional
     performance.40

"But this division of labor reflected a hierarchy of kinds of
knowledge which was also a ladder of status.  Those who create
new theory were thought to be higher in status than those who
apply it, and the schools of 'higher learning' were thought to be
superior to the 'lower.'

 "Thus were planted the seeds of the Positivist curriculum
typical of professional schools in American universities, and the
roots of the now-familiar split between research and practice."
(Pp. 34-37)

 Permit us to paraphrase Schon briefly and somewhat more
bluntly: American universities took shape at the same time the
professions were being born. It was in the financial and general
survival interests of the professions to align with this powerful
new institution, but the price for "buying in" was subservience
to the traditional bosses of the institution, namely, the basic
disciplines. This subservience, seen in the attempt of the
professions to better themselves by means of adopting the style
of inquiry popular in the basic disciplines, has stunted the
evolution of the professions. The values and the style of the
sciences have been taken on by the professions as their world
view. It is hardly safe in the Academy to question this
arrangement.

 Myriad anecdotes of not just the discontinuity between
academic research and practice but its actual conflict could be
advanced in illustration of the distance between these two
worlds: the world of theory and the world of practice. We can not
resist relating one. The many members of Maya Ying Lan's
architecture class at Yale submitted designs for the Vietnam War
Memorial to the professor, who incidentally had himself submitted
a design to the national competition along with 14,000 other
contestants. The professor was brutal in his evaluation:
"Washington is full of white memorials rising. This is a dark
memorial receding." The grade? B. The professor's design was not
accepted; and, yes, Maya Ying Lan's was.


 It would be false to argue that the universities have not
benefited many practical endeavors in the 100 year history of the
land grant system in this country. The counter-examples are
virtually legion. Indeed, it is the distinctive difference
between modern American and European universities that the former
were designed to advance the quality of life of the nation. Our
point is, instead, that the modern faculty member in an education
college in an ambitious university is discouraged by the reward
structure from any genuine contributions to the practice of
schooling. It is not that we do not hear sermons calling us to
the field; it is that young faculty risk their tenure and
promotion and old faculty risk prestige if they respond. The
modern academic scholar is not adverse to giving practical
affairs a nudge toward perfection; to be sure many of them have
private fantasies of doing just that, and successful grant-
getting depends on facility in invoking the possibility of
practical gain for one's researches. But if practice is to
benefit from these scholarly endeavors, it will have to read
about them in brief, written accounts published in archival
refereed journals. [One of us no longer reads academic journals--
the same one who has , in the past 25 years, edited three of
them; and that same one has acquired as sense from his colleagues
recently that they don't read them either. They appear to those
who have watched them for some time to be arenas in which young
people struggle for tenure or where old people act out some mono-
maniacal mission.]


Is There Anything That Can Be Done?

 If not science-building, then what can the universities do
for the schools? What "research" will help practice? I'm
uncertain, but I have three things currently in mind that are
just enough different from the way we in universities have
traditionally conducted our business that they might be
promising: action research (yes, shades of the 1950's, action
research is making a come-back); Donald Schon's ideas about
reflection-in-practice; and the qualitative or naturalistic
movement in educational research.

 "Action research" has a curious ring to it. Many of you in
the profession today are too young to remember when something
called "action research" came around the first time. In the
1950's and early '60's a movement to locate educational research
in the schools with contributions and some participation by
teachers arose out of Teachers College, Columbia, with roots in
the work of Kurt Lewin (or so I have been told). One of my
earliest recollections from graduate school is of a student
asking a professor about action research and seeing the professor
curl his lip and spit invective at the scurrilous misadventure.
Today, the movement returns to the U.S. riding on the shoulders
of British Socialism. British scholars and researchers are
seeking to vest the power for educational research in teachers,
not in professional outsiders who would make teachers mere
objects of study. [References] There is much to heed in this
development. It is remarkable how few teacher concerns are taken
up by educational researchers, who often gain the where-with-all
to undertake investigations not from teachers but from teachers'
adversaries. There is another commendable feature of the new
Action Research movement, namely, its .... that research of our
kind is highly politicized. There are no politically neutral
research questions (except trivial ones), there are not even
neutral methods for investigating research questions. There is
always a question of who owns a research agenda. Not remarkably,
perhaps, research often supports or exonerates those individuals
and organizations who have the power to set the research agenda.
Where, for example, is the research on the benefits of allowing
teachers greater autonomy in choosing curriculum, organizing
their workday, supervising and monitoring each other? Why is
there volumes written on principals evaluating teachers and
little written on teachers evaluating principals. To be the
object of study in this society is to be placed in some jeopardy.
Those who decide who studies and who gets studied command a
significant measure of political power. The new Action
Researchers remind us of all this. Now if the movement's
epistemology can become as enlightened as its politics, it may
stand a chance of catching on and changing our notion of teachers
as researchers rather than as objects of research. There is a
huge difference between being the arrow and being the bull's eye.

Donald Schon's reflection-in-practice is an epistemology of
practice which takes into account the tacit knowledge and
artistry inherent in professional practice.  The need for
reflection-in-practice arises when practitioners face situations
of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, or value conflict.
Under these divergent situations, technical rules and procedures
based on general principles and standardized knowledge are not
applicable.  To cope with these conditions in practice,
professionals sometimes engage in spontaneous intuitive action
and on-the-spot experiments which lead to new "theories-in-use".
However, because these impromptu experiments usually lack
scientific rigor, the knowledge generated in practice is not
accepted as legitimate knowledge. Practitioners intuitive and
artistic judgments and actions are often impossible to justify in
words.  This feature of reflection-in-practice only further
convinces those who are rooted in Positivism of the unscientific
nature and therefore the unimportance of the knowledge of
practice.  The model of technical rationality depends on stable,
routine conditions and fails to account for the ways in which
practitioners are able to cope with divergent situations.
     Reflection-in-action is the process which is central to the
art of practice under divergent conditions.  By reflecting on
action, even in the midst of it, the practitioner tries to make
hidden assumptions explicit, to examine them critically in the
context of the situation, to make sense of the problems
encountered, to restructure and develop new theories, and to test
these new theories in further action.  The reflective
practitioner must be willing to experience confusion, to question
prior beliefs, and to invent new strategies on the spot.  By
testing these new strategies, the practitioner gains both new
understanding of the situation and at the same time affects the
situation.  In reflection-in-practice, there is no problem with
implementing the results of research because the implementation
is a part of the research; the exchange between research and
practice is immediate.  When a professional reflects in action
(s)he becomes a researcher in the practice setting.

 Reflective research can also take place outside the
immediate context of practice.  This kind of research requires a
partnership between researcher and practitioner.  The researcher
cannot maintain a distance from practice but instead depends on
the practitioner to supply the material which needs to be
researched.  Rather than doing research at the expense of the
practitioner in an adversarial context, reflective research is
designed to support the efforts of the reflective practitioner.
 Research which focuses on enhancing the practitioner's
ability to reflect-in-action can be of four types, frame
analysis, repertoire-building research, research on fundamental
methods of inquiry and overarching theories, and research on the
process of reflection-in-action.  Frame analysis is the study of
the ways in which practitioners frame a problem.  Problems
usually do not come in neat, labeled packages but are usually
first experienced as "messes".  Frame analysis studies the
process of problem identification, conceptualization, and
definition. Repertoire-building research helps to identify and
accumulate a portfolio of cases as examples of the evolution of a
problem from framing of the situation to its eventual resolution.
Research on fundamental methods of inquiry is different from the
perspective found in technical rationality.  In Schon's sense,
these are the methods and theories of practice which are used as
guidelines for making sense of new situations.  This is a form of
"action science" which aims to develop themes or metaphors to
help practitioners understand situations of uniqueness,
uncertainty, and instability.  Research on the process of
reflection-in-action is an effort to understand the conditions
that encourage or inhibit the development of reflection-in-action
as a style of learning.

 Research in education suffers the same ills as the other
minor professions.  The context of educational practice is full
of instability, uncertainty, uniqueness, and value conflicts.
Therefore, educational research will not be able to develop a
firm base of scientific knowledge. For this reason, reflective
research in support of reflection-in-practice is a hopeful
approach if we want to improve educational practice.  "The
dilemma of rigor or relevance may be dissolved if we can develop
an epistemology of practice which places technical problem
solving within a broader context of reflective inquiry."
(Schon,1979).


 The qualitative movement in educational research is nothing
short of revolutionary. We needn't cast our minds even as far
back as graduate school to recall the time when qualitative
methods (call them naturalistic, ethnographic, anthropological or
whatever) were excluded from our journals, our seminars and our
dissertations. In the span of ten years all that has changed. The
graduate program without qualitative training in it today is
viewed as seriously behind the times. There are many grounds on
which the naturalistic approach to research on schools stands a
better chance of affecting practice than the traditional
preordinate, quantitative, hypothesis-testing model of times gone
by. For one, it rejects the idea that a complex social system can
best be understood when conceptualized in terms of what
behavioral and social sciences call "variables." One of the
clearest illustrations of how deeply ingrained is the social
science mentality is the tendency to confront practical
situations, problems, episodes or phenomena and to see only
"variables." And the very existence of "variables" prompts a host
of attendant concerns: their reliability, their factorial purity,
their construct validity, whether they are endogenous or
exogenous, dependent or independent.  This tendency was once an
unnatural and foreign style of thinking that had to be trained
into us; we have largely forgotten that we once had to learn it
and now consider it natural and common sense. Yet it is far from
clear that the conceptualization of the world in terms of
variables is even productive, let alone the most productive way
of thinking about and coping with the world. Historians, for one,
do not use variables to explain things, and for significant
events and trends they do a better job of predicting than social
scientists. Qualitative researchers, to name another, are apt to
view situations as settings, or scenes or episodes rather than as
models of variables causing and being caused by one another. It
is an article of faith that the qualitative approach will lead to
a greater understanding of our business--educating children--and
an increased ability to move the enterprise in more favorable
directions, but it is a faith born of the experience of reading
naturalistic accounts of classrooms and school offices and seeing
in them a verisimilitude lacking in the sterile accounts of
experiments and surveys that emanate from the social science
tradition.

 One more story illustrates the problems we in universities
are having in attempting to think about the world of practice and
our relationship to it, and at the same time the story touches on
the matter of the qualitative methods and the role they will be
allowed to play in the Academy. Word circulated recently that the
School of Education at the University of Michigan had resolved a
long arduous battle over the distinction between the EdD and the
PhD by deciding that dissertations for the EdD would be
qualitative and those for the PhD would be quantitative. The
story, whether it remains the policy or not, says much about our
inability to think clearly about the practice of education and
reconcile it with the pressures we feel in the universities.