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Jun 01
2011
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Use of the Information Age Education resources continues to grow. For a list of IAE’s six major resources and data about three of them, go to http://iae-pedia.org/Main_Page.
I recently read the following article:
Begley, Sharon (1/24/2011). Why almost everything you hear about medicine is wrong. Newsweek’s Education Site. Retrieved 6/1/2011 from http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/23/why-almost-everything-you-hear-about-medicine-is-wrong.html.
Quoting from the article:
If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.
But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you.
…
The situation isn’t hopeless. Geneticists have mostly mended their ways, tightening statistical criteria, but other fields still need to clean house, Ioannidis says. Surgical practices, for instance, have not been tested to nearly the extent that medications have. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion of surgical practice is based on thin air, and [claims for effectiveness] would evaporate if we studied them closely,” Ioannidis says. That would also save billions of dollars. George Lundberg, former editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that strictly applying criteria like Ioannidis pushes would save $700 billion to $1 trillion a year in U.S. health-care spending.
As I read the article, I thought about the following sequence of seven IAE Newsletter articles written by Robert Sylwester and me.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 45 July 2010. Education and Health Care Part 1: Comparing Apples and Oranges.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 46 July 2010. Education and Health Care Part 2: Proactive and Reactive Approaches.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 47 August 2010. Education and Health Care Part 3: Research and Development.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 48 August 2010. Education and Health Care Part 4: The Human Element.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 49 September 2010. Education and Health Care Part 5: Theory into Practice.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 50 September 2010. Education and Health Care Part 6: Assessment and Evaluation.
IAE Newsletter - Issue # 51 October 2010. Education and Health Care Part 7: Final Installment–Quality of Life.
These seven newsletters point out flaws in comparing medicine to education. However, they also point out ideas from one of the two disciplines that might be worth exploring in the other.
My strong feeling is Sharon Begley’s article about flaws in medical research is quite applicable to education research. There are lots and lots of articles about how to improve education. A modest number are well done research studies. And, much of the well-done research still leaves us with the serious challenge of translating research into practice.
Let’s consider the example of linking low SES (poverty) with poor performance in school. As suggested in a current sequence of IAE Newsletter issues (mid April to mid June, 2011), there is considerable data linking chronic stress to poor school performance. Chronic stress can damage one’s health and brain.
There is also considerable data on growing up in poverty is stressful for many people,and it can produce chronic stress. So, we have a link between low SES, chronic stress, damage to one’s health and brain, and some reduction in school performance. Careful qualification is lacking. And, developing cost effective, workable interventions is quite difficult.
In summary, useful research on chronic stress has occurred and is occurring. Using the research to substantially improve education is a very challenging, ongoing problem.
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Thus, students in the various teacher education programs often counter successful educational researchers, and certainly they are obtaining their overall education in a research-oriented environment. Back when I was teaching preservice and inservice teachers, I often asked my class to make a list of ways in which educational research has improved education.
We discussed possible meanings of "improve" and I stressed ideas such as students learning more, better, faster, retaining their learning better, being better at making use of their learning, and so on.
My students found it was easier to point to some major changes in our educational system rather than point to research-based improvements. For example, they pointed to integration, requiring more years of schooling, the progress women have made in math education, and substantial progress toward equalization in men's and women's sports in schools.
ICT in education is near and dear to my heart. Consider the many billions of dollars that have been invested in the overall process of integrating computer technology into schools. What evidence do we have that is based on solid educational research and the strongly supports a contention that
We have some research based on use of computer-assisted learning—ad, on more recent use of Highly Interactive Intelligent Computer-Assisted learning materials. This sort of research is aimed at the heart of what I mean by "improve." We have lots of assertions about eduction being better because students can look up information on the Web, make use of a word process, and make use of multimedia in writing and doing presentations. I think evidence is weak that this improves education.
In the world outside of formal schooling, people routinely use Information and Communication /technology as an aid to representing and solving the problems (and, accomplishing the tacks) relevant to their work. We can measure or attempt to measure increases in quality and quantity of performance brought on by ICT.
My conclusion is that we need to make routine use of assessment instruments in school settings in which students can routinely use ICT as they work on challenging problems and tasks. One of the (measurable) goals in education would then become how well students perform in this authentic assessment environment. Research could then be done on ways to improve such performance.