Why One Should Study Research?
Many students who join Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) and Master of Education (M.Ed.) courses in India usually wonder why it is necessary to learn the basics of research in education. There are two reasons for which this subject is recommended for study.
First, they will have extensive careers in education (as teachers and teacher educators along with other educational professionals) that would certainly require them to keep abreast of the changes, improvements, and innovations in the field. In order to do this, they will need to be knowledgeable consumers of educational research to become better practitioners. Many reputed practitioners and educators in the field of education believe that students can best learn to be judicious consumers of research and become thoughtful practitioners by under standing the research process from the perspective of researchers who are engaged in the field of education at various levels. To understand the full implications of research, as it might affect them, students need to appreciate the decisions that a researcher needs to make. possible alternatives to those decisions, and the consequences of the results and conclusions. Finally, they need to judge the quality of research and the possibility of generalizing it to their educational setting,
Second, teachers, teacher educators, and other educational professionals continually need to examine what they are doing and compare their practices with different methods used by others in similar settings. To achieve this, they need to be knowledgeable and, thus, they largely depend on four sources of knowledge personal experience, tradition, authority, and research. And research has become a source of dependable form of knowledge. One may conduct action research to determine if a procedure is working or whether they need to try something different and new with another student or class. In addition, collaboration between teachers and teacher educators and university or independent researchers is becoming a commonplace. As such, it is not unlikely that at some point of time in the near future, a researcher may ask a student of education to collaborate on a project or a student may even ask a researcher to collaborate on one. There is also a possibility that a B.Ed. or an M.Ed. student would like to shape his or her career as a researcher in the field of education instead of becoming a teacher or teacher educator.
The Search for Knowledge
Human beings are the unique product of their creation and evolution. In contrast to other forms of animal life, their more highly developed nervous system has enabled them to develop sounds and symbols (letters and numbers) that make possible the communication and recording of their questions, observations, experiences, and ideas.
It is understandable that their greater curiosity, implemented by their control of symbols, would lead people to speculate about the operation of the universe, the great forces beyond their own control. Over many centuries people began to develop what seemed to be plausible explanations. Attributing the forces of nature to the working of supernatural powers, they
believed that the gods manipulated the sun, stars, wind, rain, and lightning at their whim. The appearance of the medicine man or priest, who claimed special channels of communication with the gods, led to the establishment of a system of religious authority passed on from one generation to another. A rigid tradition developed, and a dogma of nature’s processes, explained in terms of mysticism and the authority of the priesthood, became firmly rooted, retarding further search for truth for centuries.
But gradually people began to see that the operations of the forces of nature were not as capricious as they had been led to believe. They began to observe an orderliness in the universe and certain cause-and-effect relationships; they discovered that under certain conditions events could be predicted with reasonable accuracy. However, these explanations were often rejected if they seemed to conflict with the dogma of religious authority. Curious per sons who raised questions were often punished and even put to death when they persisted in expressing doubts suggested by such unorthodox explanations of natural phenomena.
This reliance on empirical evidence or personal experience challenged the sanction of vested authority and represented an important step in the direction of scientific inquiry. Such pragmatic observation, however, was largely unsystematic and further limited by the lack of an objective method. Observers were likely to overgeneralize on the basis of incomplete experience or evidence, to ignore complex factors operating simultaneously, or to let their feelings and prejudices influence both their observations and their conclusions.
It was only when people began to think systematically about thinking itself that the era of logic began. The first systematic approach to reasoning, attributed to Aristotle and the Greeks, was the deductive method. The categorical syllogism was one model of thinking that prevailed among early philosophers. Syllogistic reasoning established a logical relationship between a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. A major premise is a self-evident assumption, previously established by metaphysical truth or dogma, that concerns a relation ship, a minor premise is a particular case related to the major premise. Given the logical relationship of these premises, the conclusion is inescapable. A typical Aristotelian categorical syllogism follows:
Major Premise: All men are mortal.
Minor Premise: Socrates is a man
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
This deductive method, moving from the general assumption to the specific application made an important contribution to the development of modern problem solving. But it was not fruitful in arriving at new truths. The acceptance of incomplete or false major premises
that were based on old dogmas or unreliable authority could only lead to error. Semantic difficulties often resulted from shifting definitions of the terms involved.
Centuries later Francis Bacon advocated direct observation of phenomena, arriving at conclusions or generalizations through the evidence of many individual observations. This inductive process of moving from specific observations to the generalization freed logic from some of the hazards and limitations of deductive thinking. Bacon recognized the obstacle that the deductive process placed in the way of discovering new truth. It started with old dogmas that religious or intellectual authorities had already accepted and, thus, could be expected to arrive at few new truths. These impediments to the discovery of truth, which he termed
“idols,” were exposed in his Novum Organum, written in 1620. The following story, attributed to Bacon, expresses his revolt against the authority of the written word, an authority that dominated the search for truth during the Middle Ages:
In the year of our Lord, 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonder of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sorely vexed, he beseeched them in a manner coarse and unheard of, to look in the mouth of a horse and find answers to their questionings.
At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceedingly wroth, and joining in a mighty uproar they flew upon him and smote him hip and thigh and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, “Surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers.” After many days of grievous strife the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they, as one man, declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.
The method of inductive reasoning proposed by Bacon, a method new to the field of logic but widely used by the scientists of his time, was not hampered by false premises, by the inadequacies and ambiguities of verbal symbolism, or by the absence of supporting evidence. But the inductive method alone did not provide a completely satisfactory system for the solution of problems. Random collection of individual observations without a unifying concept or focus often obscured investigations and therefore rarely led to a generalization or theory. Also, the same set of observations can lead to different conclusions and support different, even opposing, theories.
The deductive method of Aristotle and the inductive method of Bacon were fully integrated in the work of Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century. During his early career his observations of animal life failed to lead to a satisfactory theory of man’s development. The concept of the struggle for existence in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population intrigued Darwin and suggested the assumption that natural selection explains the origin of different species of animals. This hypothesis provided a needed focus for his investigations. He proceeded to deduce specific consequences suggested by the hypothesis. The evidence he gathered confirmed the hypothesis that biological change in the process of natural selection, in which favorable variations were preserved and unfavorable ones destroyed, resulted in the formation of new species.