ABSTRACT
I want to comment on Dr. Scriven’s remarks. There are two aspects that concern me. The first is his charge that psychological research inevitably lacks ecological validity. He argues that in order to be assured of doing something important, psychologists had better sample some real-life tasks. Based on considerable experience with applied educational research, it is my judgment that you can muddle along in a cut-and-dry, technological, highly empirical way with these tasks, every once in a while stumbling upon a minor insight, but getting no fundamental or profound view of the nature of the human condition, the nature of knowing, the nature of perception. We do need bottom-up work which concerns itself with direct practical purposes, with school-like tasks. However, from the shards and pieces of practical knowledge that arise from this, we are never going to get a coherent view of the human condition. So, I think it wrong just to make a blanket dismissal, despite the fact that every one of us here would concur with Tulving’s assessment about the past irrelevance of psychology to the educational enterprise.
