9: Education’s Challenge to Psychology: The Prediction of Behavior From Person-Environment Interactions

Abstract

trends in research methodology for the special RER issue entitled TwentyFive Years of Educational Research, Walker (1956, p. 326) described how successive issues on research methodology tended to place more and more emphasis on the . . variety, complexity, and importance of statistical methods for analyzing data gathered by various technics. It is interesting to conjecture about how the present issue on research methodology will be evaluated some years hence against the background of these past trends and the undoubtedly accelerated trends of the future. This issue departs appreciably from the usual format and requires the author to examine how research pertinent to education is being conducted in his substantive field and to provide a critical analysis and evaluation of a few selected areas of current research endeavor from the point of view of relevance, generalizability, potential, and limitations. The task is one that stimulates a desire to take stock of current conditions and needs in the field and to speculate about desirable directions for the future. The contemporary social and political context certainly encourages such stock-taking. The challenge that speaks (and sometimes shrieks) of relevance can be rejected, ignored, controverted, rationalized, or redefined in less objectionable terms, but it still exists and must be contended with in one way or another. And any socially conscious research worker is certain to have periods of heightened concern and remorse when he considers the enormity of those contemporary social issues in relation to the utility of the armamentarium that psychology can bring to bear upon them. What we need to know about the specific determinants of cognitive deficit in the disadvantaged is staggering, and the educational methods of greatest benefit to its amelioration are still a matter of conjecture and opinion. The turmoil on America's campuses is now being explained ex post facto and with vigor by the armchair theorists, but such activity does not hide the psychologists' very evident inability to predict the psychosocial determinants of these events and their ultimate outcomes.