In Defense of Ed Research Silos
RCEd Commentary
If you spend any time around a university, you will soon hear the term “interdisciplinary.” It’s an accolade. Administrators in particular love the idea of knocking down academic silos, the favored term for the fact that researchers tend to read only research within their own field, and to write for and speak to that audience. Education has a long history as an interdisciplinary field; schools of education include researchers trained in fields as diverse as political science, economics, critical theory, psychology, sociology, history and many others. Although interdisciplinary work has led to great advances in some fields, I think this sensibility has actually been an impediment to progress in the application of education research.
At first glance it might appear that a school of education should obviously be a place of interdisciplinary study. After all, every researcher attempts to understand the same thing. Wouldn’t a reading researcher planning an evaluation of phonics program like to talk to an historian who could tell her that similar programs were used in the 1940s?
To a point, sure, but this factoid does not represent the real work of an historian. And a reading researcher worth her salt knows what’s been tried before. The challenge lies in connecting the real work the two researchers. The historian and the reading researcher employ different tools, make different assumptions, and produce different artifacts and conclusions as a consequence of their work. In most cases, these differences mean that the work is incompatible. People focus on discipline-specific vocabulary as the problem, but also assume that a translation dictionary is possible. But when researchers attach different meanings to the term to “know” something -- which is usually the case -- you’ve got a problem beyond vocabulary.
Bridges can be built, as I’ve noted in the case of neuroscience and education, but it isn’t easy.
The focus on knocking down silos carries two negative consequences. First, I think education researchers too often comment on matters they know little about. For example, as a cognitive psychologist I’m pretty ignorant about how to analyze education policy. Aspects of cognitive psychology do come up in policy debates. For example, in the Common Core, the increased emphasis on non-fiction is justified by arguing that broader world knowledge will improve student’s reading proficiency. If you’re a cognitive psychologist who knows that justification is reasonable, it’s a natural next step to comment on other aspects of the Common Core. But I think doing so is a mistake. Common Core is a policy issue with angles on it like a spider’s web. I understand these no better than any person picked at random strolling through the UVA rotunda.
The “smash the silos” idea contributes to that problem to the extent that it makes researchers self-identify as “education researchers” rather than “cognitive psychologists.” And you don’t have to go far in the blogosphere or popular press to find edupolicy types weighing in on child development or historians discussing psychometrics. (And you don’t have to search far back in the archives to find me making the same mistake. It was not until I said a few exceptionally dumb things about policy that I decided to stick to what I know.)
The second problem exacerbated by the interdisciplinary ideal is our collective amnesia for previous initiatives. Think: what would you say we know with certainty about educating children that we did not know fifty years ago? For most of us, this list of good ideas would be very short indeed. (Or it would include “new” ideas that were also seen as new 50 years ago.) There’s more than one reason for this, surely: the difficulty of the problem, our collective desire for instant improvement and consequent lack of patience. But another contributor is our inability to see ideas as collections of smaller ideas. When we try something and fail, the failure is seen as wholesale, irredeemable. Thus, we draw no conclusion beyond what a terrible idea it was. If, in contrast, we see a larger idea or initiative as a collection of smaller ideas, we are more likely to evaluate the smaller pieces separately. Yes, No Child Left Behind didn’t work; but gathering more school-level achievement data and disaggregating it by race, ethnicity, and income did work in some senses. It identified problems we had not been aware of.
Seeing education solutions as all of a piece goes hand in hand with seeing education research as all of a piece.
I would like to see more research silos. By that I mean researchers who are ready to be specific about what they think they know, what assumptions that knowledge rests on, and how they think that knowledge contributes to the larger problem of improving education. That’s a silo; it’s staking out your territory and admitting ignorance as to what’s outside it.
If researchers thought more clearly about their scope of expertise, it’s just possible that they would (1) make fewer claims outside it; (2) argue more vigorously for the successful policy pieces within their field that ought to be remembered.
Note: Part of being a good silo citizen is knowing your field. I’ve been offered an opportunity to spend a solid year immersed in cognitive psychology. Cambridge University Press will publish a new edition of my textbook, Cognition, which I’ll write with a co-author, Cedar Riener. Bringing myself up-to-the-minute in my field won’t allow time for blogging, but having blogged weekly for four years, I think it’s a good time for a break. Look for occasional contributions here at RealClearEducation.com, and other updates at my website.
