Educating Researchers

Tonight, I've been reading Arthur Levine's newest installment in his series of policy reports based on the results of a four-year study of America’s education schools. After targeting teacher education and school administrators' training, he turned his critical eye on the preparation of educational researchers. As a Ph.D. student in educational policy and research, I found myself nodding repeatedly, especially at this:

"The problem is that the doctoral programs offered and the degrees awarded by education schools are a mishmash. Programs for the preparation of researchers and the education of practitioners generally look very much alike . . .The blurring in purpose of the Ed.D. and Ph.D. leads to a larger problem in the preparation of education researchers. It encourages a
commensurate blurring in the programs to prepare researchers and practitioners. More often than not, they enroll in the same doctoral programs. The result is that practitioners too often receive an education designed for researchers, and future scholars take their course work with
practitioners who have little interest in research or rigorous scholarly studies."

I just finished my first course in my Ph.D. program in educational policy, planning, and leadership. The course, Educational Research, was designed to provide the foundations of research design. There was a handful of Ph.D. students in the class, but the group consisted mainly of Ed.D. students. And the latter group for the most part had absolutely no interest in learning about research design and didn't understand most of the course content. The professor had to revisit topics such as internal validity several times, taking class time away from new topics in order to help these students learn the basics. The course was taught from the perspective of learning about research in order to interpret it (i.e., the practitioner's perspective), not from the perspective of conducting research yourself. These are the frustrations when the two groups of students are indiscriminantly mixed in classes.

Check out Levine's report -- there's a link on this page.