good way of testing the adequacy of a conceptual framework. A related problem in educational research would be to oversimplify the motivational factors underlying parental choice of schools in, for example, India (Gurney 2017).3 A related but different difficulty is that an inadequate investigation has been made of the conceptual framework and epistemological presuppositions of those being investigated by social scientists. They thus run the risk of misconstruing the phenomena which they seek to describe. This appears to be the case in, for example, Evans-Pritchard’s account of the poison oracle in Zande society, where it is assimilated to a form of inadequate scientific reasoning (Evans-Pritchard 1936). A similar phenomenon in education would be when researchers misunderstand parental attitudes to schooling, failing to realise that the parents being researched set greater store by different educational processes (Brice-Heath 1983). In this kind of case, insufficient attention is paid to the ways in which subjects of research perceive their practices and how those practices link up with other practices within a culture and thus what it makes sense to say within those practices (see Rhees 1970).
A fourth issue, closely related to the one just discussed, is concerned with the ways in which empirical enquiries in education are conducted. Although they are empirical, this does not mean that they should solely concern themselves with events, processes or states of affairs connected with educational practices. There is very often an important interpretive or hermeneutic role to be played in such studies if they are not to fall into the trap of oversimplifying or even misconstruing what they are studying. A good example, which we will look at more closely in Chapter 10, concerns the use of terminology connected with professional know-how and vocational education, where a combination of linguistic ‘false friends’ and a form of linguistic imperialism can lead to an inability to see what is important in the practices under scrutiny.
These pitfalls bear out a point that Peter Winch made in, 1958, that many of the important theoretical issues that have been raised in relation to the social sciences ‘belong to philosophy rather than social science’ (Winch, P. 1958, p. 17). This continues to be a problem in empirical educational research, but does not obviate the need for it.
Inappropriate Methods and Flawed Explanations
Many of the complaints about EER do not focus on the conceptual issues, but rather on whether or not research designs are sufficiently technically robust to sustain the conclusions of their investigations. A particular complaint is that there is a tendency to overgeneralise. Thus Robin Barrow writes on the inadvisability of teachers using EER: ‘…for the teacher should never act on a generalisation, since for all he knows the children he faces, or some other aspect of his situation, are exceptions to the generalisation’ (Barrow 1984, p. 186). Although Barrow points to a real difficulty for EER, he cannot use this claim to assert its impossibility. The statement above is itself an educational generalisation and, if true, refutes the claim that it makes, since at least one educational generalisation is then true. If false it entails that some educational generalisations are true. EER would indeed have difficulties if any generalisation were forbidden. Fortunately that need not be so. First, because the claim itself is incoherent and second because what is meant by a generalisation is over-specified. Barrow appears to treat a generalisation based on educational research as a universally quantified proposition of the form:
For all x, if Fx then Gx
which is refutable by a case of an F which is not G. But although this is how generality is treated in textbooks on deductive logic, it is not necessarily how it is thought of in EER or indeed in many other contexts. We can tolerate some exceptions to a generalisation often because generalisations are implicitly understood to mean ‘Nearly all cases of F are G’. Second, they are very often hedged with an implicit contextual limitation so that they only have a limited range of application. Barrow, however, seems to go further than this and to wish to deny that a teacher (and by implication a researcher) could develop an explanation that applied to more than one pupil at a time. This move, however, raises an issue which we will consider in more detail in the next chapter. A successful explanation of a phenomenon is usually one that allows some purpose to be achieved. This does not entail that it has to describe, in minute detail, all the particulars of a chain of events which purport to be covered by the explanation. It suffices that the phenomenon is explained in such a way as to usually lead to greater understanding of or to the improvement of practice. There are ways of assessing the quality of explanations in this respect which any explanation will need to take account of. To take an example, if one is trying to explain why a method of teaching reading is relatively successful compared to alternative methods, one is required to show that it is a better explanation of why than any other that is practically feasible. It does not require that the explanation is an exhaustive account of every detail of each individual child’s learning to read.
The key point is that explanations have to address particular problems or concerns raised by researchers, not that they either confer certainty or exhaustiveness in relation to the phenomena with which they are concerned.5 If we were to take such objections as the above seriously then educational explanation would be impossible in most cases and thus our knowledge of educational practices could not be attained through systematic investigation. A good case could therefore be made out for saying that it is unknowable. These considerations should lead us to provisionally dismiss objections 2 and 3.
Difficulties Related to Context and Identity
Related objections that occur repeatedly in the work of Andrew Davis (e.g. 1995, 2015) concern the complexity and stability of educational phenomena. The context-dependent nature of educational phenomena has already been remarked on in relation to Barrow’s work. However, Davis also claims that transferability is also a major problem. Transferability applies to knowledge and know-how. Thus something learned in one context might not be applied in another (e.g. formal mathematics in the classroom applied to practical situations in household budgeting). However, the evidence for non-transferability is weak and if it were largely true, would jeopardise the rationale for much formal education. The second part of the objection, that concept-dependent educational entities like schools have very weak criteria of identity and cannot thus be meaningfully spoken about outside very specific contexts is, perhaps, a more serious objection.
Certainly, if the criteria for identity of such things as schools or teaching methods had to be as robust as those for spatio-temporal objects then the objection would have some force. However, there is no reason to suppose that this is so. We do not find difficulty in talking about the same school or the same teaching method over a period of time, either in ordinary lay discourse or in a research context. Nevertheless, the objection does point to something important, namely that we need to take care in elucidating criteria of identity when talking about educational practices and institutions. This takes care of objection 4.
Most Educational Findings are False
There are two ways in which we can approach this claim. The first is through a generalised falsificationist approach (e.g. Popper 1959). In this sense, no finding of educational research, however robustly conducted, could be true. But this point, dependent on Popperian views of the provisional nature of scientific assertions, is just as true of the results of any scientific enquiry as it is of educational research. Underlying it are two questionable assumptions. The first concerns the unreliability of induction, a Humean concern which Popper appears to endorse (Popper 1959; Hume 1978). Induction, by its nature, cannot deliver deductive certainty, which is not to say that we cannot be certain about many matters established by induction, just that certainty in the cases of robust inductive inferences does not exclude the appearance of counter-examples.
The second objection is closely related to a conception of truth that we had cause
