Science Plus: A Response to the Responses to <i>Scientific Research in Education</i>

Abstract

I come to the task of commenting on these articles with mixed feelings. I was a member of the National Research Council Committee on Scientific Principles for Educational Research, the committee that produced Scientific Research in Education (National Research Council, 2002). In other words, I contributed to the work that the articles in this collection critique. I am also an anthropologist and qualitative researcher, so the authors of the articles here are my mentors, colleagues, and friends. They have written that they agree with some, even much, of what appears in Scientific Research in Education (SRE), but they also take serious issue with it. In this brief commentary, I wish to give my interpretation of SRE: What it does and does not say (to me) and why what it says is not enoughFa point the articles in this collection make very clear. Jim Gee (this issue) is right. SRE is a situated document. As a consensus report created by 16 researchers and a study director, sponsored by several agencies, written in a year’s time in an effort to influence congressional legislation, and potentially affecting the lives of thousands of researchers and hundreds of thousands of students and teachers, the production of SRE is situated not in one theory but in multiple theories. It is also situated in politics, group dynamics, history, and context. To say it is a compromise(d) document is an understatement; to say it is not perfect is correct; to say it was not well-intentioned is inappropriate. I hope my commentary makes this clear.