Risky Research Business: Mathematics Education Research on the Margins

Scientifically based research (SBR) has been institutionalized in the United States through the United States Department of Education and the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) as the only valid or valued approach to-or the gold standard for (Lather, 2010; Schoenfeld, 2008)-education research (Popkewitz, 2006). SBR-mentioned more than 110 times in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (Ritter, Anderson, Koedinger, & Corbett, 2007) and explicated by the National Research Council (2002)-is a conservative approach to education research in which social science follows a more positivist natural science model based on large-scale, double-blind, randomized, controlled trials (Lather, 2010). Eisenhart and DeHaan (2005) summarize the National Research Council's guidelines for SBR:1. To pose significant questions that can be investigated empirically;2. To link research to relevant theory;3. To use methods that permit direct investigation of the question;4. To provide an explicit and coherent chain of reasoning;5. To replicate and generalize across studies; and6. To make research public to encourage professional scrutiny and critique, (p. 3)The stringent criteria used to evaluate SBR define "relevant [educational] research'' as "only studies involving experimental design" (English, 2008, p. 5). These criteria dictate what programs and practices can be used in education (Shealey, 2006) and require that they be catalogued in the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC; Schoenfeld, 2008). The WWC operates, then, as a repository for interventions and strategies vetted through SBR. These strategies bear the stamp of evidence-based, which implies adherence to the principles of SBR. Their inclusion in the WWC positions the strategies as proven solutions to educational problems that work as the WWC name affirms. Thus, SBR operates under the guiding principle that the purpose of education research is to set forth solutions to education's problems (whether real or perceived) that have passed political muster, thus supporting a political agenda in education (Biesta, 2007).The loom of SBR does not imply a dictatorial regime in which education researchers must restrict their work to prescribed methods. In fact, under SBR education researchers can pursue research questions and hypotheses in any manner they choose. However, the pursuit does entail a measure of risk as standardizing SBR necessarily marginalizes forms of research that fall outside its bounds and limits opportunities for those who do work in those forms. Mechanisms like the WWC represent the establishment of federal priorities related to the type of educational research it will support, which, by extension, dictates what types of research funding agencies will support (English, 2008). With research institutions relying more on external funding as a significant portion of tenure and promotion criteria, federal funding agencies' preferences for SBR are of particular concern to junior faculty. Ironically, as NCLB has narrowed standards for quality in education research to focus on SBR, pockets of education researchers have begun, almost simultaneously, to take up theories and methodologies that ask new questions and seek to examine old questions in new ways (Bullock, 2012; English, 2008; Hiebert, 1999). Most often, these approaches do not align with SBR's focus on uncomplicated-"too many 'on-theother-hands' and too much attention to contextual variation and alternative possibilities produce immobilization" (Donmoyer, 2012, p. 802)-and generalizable answers to educational problems.SBR has met little resistance in the mathematics education research community perhaps because SBR reflects the historically dominant paradigm of mathematics education research (Stinson & Bullock, 2012), a rather young and narrow research domain that has struggled to establish its identity (Kilpatrick, 1992; Schoenfeld, 2008). Although the mathematics education research community has embraced some more conservative forms of qualitative research and some use of critical social theories, the cannon of mathematics education research still aligns with a more post-positivist model. …