I just returned from the 2016 AERA (American Education Research Association) conference in Washington DC. I set up a booth in the exhibitor area to highlight the book (Authentic Quantitative Analysis for Leadership Decision-Making). In a bit if irony I was across from the Harvard Education Press booth and they probably had a 100 books on display—my booth only had the one. At the same time, mine was the only booth dedicated to the EdD, and I was pleasantly surprised at the large number of people who stopped by.
I must have had conversations
with individuals from 60-70 EdD programs from around the country. These conversations confirmed
that many are concerned about the state of how quantitative research is taught.
There is a sense that something is wrong as students are increasingly turning
to qualitative research. There is nothing wrong with qualitative research if it
is being used for the right reason—as opposed to students feeling that
quantitative methods are too difficult and that they cannot master it, as well
as not seeing the relevancy of the traditional complex quantitative methods for their
practice.
There was a tremendous response to the ideas in the book and
many were drawn to moving quantitative methods from being a course
on statistics to one that focuses on leadership decision-making. It is also
becoming clearer the forms of statistical analyses used for PhD programs to
test theory and those used to inform leadership decision-making are different.
It is not that the statistics are different, but the degree of statistical methodological control and criteria for interpreting
the results are different. The big problem for practice is that the forms of
statistical analyses typically found in published quantitative research tend to
over-estimate the importance of the findings for improving practice in the real
world. In other words, the methods used in published research on the effectiveness of practices being tested are overly complex and unintelligible, and then in the end the
results are misleading.
When I talk to professors who specialize in policy and practice , but who are not methodologists, about these problems the
typical comment is that they do not get involved with, or understand, quantitative
research. The result is that we have as a profession have abdicated
responsibility for making important decisions about what is effective and left
that to statisticians. The statisticians/methodologists have developed powerful
techniques that enable them to declare small differences as having important
practical importance. But the reality is that these do not have actual real
world importance (see the earlier post about the problems that small differences are causing in psychology).
That is why the focus of the book is on much simpler and
more accurate ways to determine the practical importance of quantitative
research evidence. It is not just that this is important for making better
decisions as to what practices are likely to be effective in your settings, it
is important for our profession to retake responsibility for interpreting
evidence as to effective practices. This book is a critical tool for enabling each
and every one of us who are the ones who best understand the dynamics within
schools and the needs and abilities of students and teachers to stop being
cowed by quantitative evidence and to critically embrace the valuable information
contained within quantitative data.
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