ABSTRACT

Critical readers are trying to assimilate each and every relevant dimension in both the research process and the writing of articles. Critical readers know how to “unpack” articles of their content, but they also know how to respond to articles on multiple levels as well. This is true of any skilled reader. Skilled readers juggle art, craft, content, and style to the maximum benefit of each dimension. Every educational research article is written because its researchers have something that they wanted to say. They wanted to tell about their studies and explorations, their puzzlements and successes, their breakthroughs and struggles. Critical theorists are reinventing not only the discourse of education, but the forms of that discourse as well. Statistical procedures of staggering complexity, which were literally not calculable by human beings 50 years ago or less, reside in statistical packages on laptop computers.