Is education research all dreck?
My guest is cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a pyschology professor at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” By Daniel Willingham Sharon Begley, science editor at Newsweek, doesn’t have anything nice to say about education research. In a recent article, she refers to it as “second-class science” and “so flimsy as to be a national scandal.” I agree that there is a problem, but I don’t think she’s diagnosed it correctly. There is a lot of excellent research in education. I spend most of my time reading basic scientific work and trying to understand what it means for classrooms and for policy, and much of what I draw on is education research. There is, however, also a good deal of dreck. There is a certain amount of poor science in other fields as well. Go to the psychology section of a large book store and you’ll see plenty of nonsense. Books with crazy suggestions on dieting, love, self-actualization, and so on. The difference between psycholog
