How do you decide which education research studies you buy into? Sometimes, people make distinctions based on the approach researchers have taken. They may dismiss case study or ethnographic approaches, for example, believing them to be too subjective.

Others may be sceptical of quantitative approaches, arguing that education is too complex to capture in numbers. Some even dismiss education research outright, claiming that none of it really means anything.

I think such sweeping statements are unwarranted, for a number of reasons. First, what is “education research”, anyway? Education is complex. It is made up of multiple processes and is therefore rooted in the literature of psychology and sociology, as well as instructional science. Then, there are the policy aspects to education. And what about the design of classroom resources? And maybe economics as well?

In other words, education research covers a huge number of overlapping disciplines, all of which come with their own sets of assumptions, methods and paradigms. Those assumptions lead people to dismiss studies, I believe, sometimes unfairly.

My suspicion is that when people make disparaging remarks about “education research”, they are being led by their own views on the purpose of education.

What’s more, they are then classifying certain research methods as “good” and others as “bad”, which I don’t think is justified. No methodological approach is intrinsically “good” or “bad”, but methods need to be commensurate with the research question that researchers are trying to answer, and conclusions should, of course, not overreach the available evidence.

Keeping an open mind about education research

In a previous column, I argued that knowing more about the philosophy of science, and disputes between great thinkers such as Hume and Kant, could help to create more widespread respect for the views of others.

I now believe that this knowledge could also serve as a reminder that there is a reason why debates about the big problems in society have been rumbling on for so long. We are far from the first people in history to grapple with the issue of what works best in education and silver bullets do not come around regularly.

Maybe that is because every context is different. Only an individual teacher, standing in front of their class, can judge what those pupils need at any particular time.

Unfortunately, reliance on “context” is seen as a cop-out by some. Research, they argue, must be able to make generalisations. And yet, to paraphrase David Berliner, we have to acknowledge that while local conditions make generalisations harder, we need context to put research findings into perspective.

Another researcher, David Labaree, has pointed out that education research will never be a science of hard truths, as humans are unpredictable. Any attempt to study how they learn will be subject to a certain level of uncertainty.

Yet perhaps we need to embrace this uncertainty. Research into teaching and learning has to happen at the junction of many different disciplines because that is the space that education occupies, right at the centre of our society.

Rather than bicker about this, we need to recognise the benefits of it and try to better understand how all of those different views, paradigms, assumptions and approaches can work together to improve what happens in our classrooms.

Christian Bokhove is associate professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton and a specialist in research methodologies

This article originally appeared in the 24 September 2021 issue under the headline “Hard truths don’t exist in education so embrace the uncertainty”