ABSTRACT
Scientific inquiry in the learning sciences often includes hypothesis generation and evaluation together, in a kind of dialectic process. We believe that understanding such inquiry can be enhanced by focusing on the interaction between hypothesis generation and evaluation, rather than by separating them as some accounts of science have in the past (e.g., Popper’s, 1959 distinction between the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification”). Therefore, much research in the learning sciences involves not just classic hypothesis testing in which scientists specify hypotheses in advance of collecting data and design experiments to provide definitive refutation or tentative confirmation of those hypotheses. At the same time, what many of us are doing is not characterized by a naïve view of ethnographic inquiry in which investigators attempt to begin with a theoretical clean slate, developing hypotheses only in response to patterns in the data. Instead, the kind of research many of us are doing is characterized by the progressive refinement of hypotheses, with theory and data interacting throughout the process.
