A Test of Some Common Contentions About Educational Research

Abstract

In recent years, educational researchers have become consumed by arguments about the relative merits of different genres of research. Some researchers advocate experiments, others advocate ethnographies, and still others advocate narratives. Many genre advocates refer to teachers to justify their arguments, claiming that teachers need more authoritative knowledge (so we should conduct experiments), more dynamic portraits that reveal multiple truths (so we should write narratives), or more richly detailed accounts (so we should do ethnographies). This study examined a variety of contentions about research genres by asking teachers to read and discuss five examples of research, with each example representing a different research genre. Teachers' responses to these articles did not support any of the common contentions about research genres. I conclude from the study that genre is not the most important determinant of an article's value to teachers and that the genre argument is distracting educational researchers from other, more important research tasks.