ABSTRACT
If social-science research can be said to be about one thing, it is about chance, the chance associated with risks and possibilities. Chance rules the social sciences. If the social sciences are going to improve the public value of this research, it will be by working with and on the public’s understanding of chance. When a recent research study claimed that AsianAmerican parents possess “significantly higher” educational expectations for their children than Latino and European-American parents, this was because the chance that the difference in parents’ expectations is mere coincidence had been calculated to be less than 1 in 20, otherwise represented statistically as p< .05. (Had the chance of coincidence been greater than 1 in 20, then the difference would have been dismissed as lacking statistical significance.) This difference is worth taking into account, chances are, when working with communities on improving educational test scores. Chance plays no less a part in research that does not use statistical analysis to arrive at its conclusions. By inter-viewing a student teacher over the course of her teacher-education program, a researcher finds just how it is that a prospective teacher with an extensive knowledge of a subject area is still likely to need a good deal of help
transforming that expertise into lessons for her students. This is the order of knowledge offered by the social sciences.1
