The Experimental Ecology of Education

Abstract

Ishall begin by stating three basic requirements that, in my judgment, must be met if we are to make progress in the scientific study of educational systems and processes. 1. Our researches cannot be reistricted to the laboratory; for the most part, they must be carried out in real-life educational settings. As will be indicated below, this does not mean that laboratory experiments cannot serve a useful and, indeed, essential purpose, but they must be carried out with explicit recognition of the delimiting and distorting nature of the laboratory as a setting and deliberately designed to articulate closely with and complement companion researches carried out in real-life situations. 2. Whether and how people learn in educational settings is a function of sets of forces, or systems, at two levels: