ABSTRACT
Most people enter the field of educational research with good intentions of improving education and the lives of children. Countless good ideas, however, remain in university halls. Curricular and pedagogical innovations rise and fall in schools because there is insufficient understanding of how the innovation can and will be used. At the same time, technological innovations in schools are becoming more and more politically contentious. People, reasonably, want to know that we are giving their children “proven” curricular materials. To Congress, this means that evaluators should engage in “scientifically based research” (“No Child Left Behind Act” 2001). Not willing to cede the definition of scientific methodology to lawmakers, educational researchers have begun their own vigorous debate. Fundamentally, they ask (and this book asks), what should count as a scientific warrant that evidence supports a claim?
