Perspectives H.R. 4875, a bill to reauthorize OERI, provides some windows for looking in on the thinking of legislative staff about education research, and offers some sobering lessons for the profession about what they think of education research. But the core of the legislative definition is the stipulation that scientific research means testing stated hypotheses through experimental design.
Legislators seek certainty.
The National Reading Panel study has had inordinate influence with staff responsible for the drafting the OERI legislation. Among the reasons the study is influential with staff is that it was portrayed as getting to the bottom of the issues about reading research, i.e., mining a vein of certainty. Other paradigms of knowledge validation, such as the balanced synthesis methods associated with the work of the National Academy of Science in its reading study, do not impress Congressional staff. Most researchers would have paid the article little heed because it moves somewhat indiscriminately between speaking of education reform and education research, engages in a good deal of hyperbole and scape-goating, and generally offers a simplistic understanding of research. And so on.