Research on Economic Education: Is It Asking the Right Questions?

The division of responsibility between the two papers at this session is a fascinating one. One author has agreed to examine the questions that are being asked in the economics education literature, and the other to examine the answers! As is so often the case, however, the underlying assumption of separability does not hold. A research question is not a "good" or "bad" question independent of the quality of the answers it is likely to generate. An "exciting" question that is unlikely to yield an answer of substantial value is not a good question. Research is a production process in which something called "useful knowledge" is the output. The inputs to this process include both the specification of questions that are important-in the sense that the answers would have great expected value-and the marshaling of resources (i.e., the incurring of costs) to answer the questions. If the costs of answering all research questions were equal, or were random with respect to the significance of the question, then the separability of the decisions on question specification and on question answering would be justified. What we probably confront, however, is a less fortuitous set of conditions in which the questions that are most valuable to answer are also the most costly (i.e., difficult). The issue I have been asked to deal with-whether research on economic education is asking the right questions-thus involves implicitly the performance of a benefit-cost analysis on project selection in the area of economic education research. An evaluation is needed of (a) the expected benefits (more precisely, the probability distribution of benefits conditional on answers of various quality), and (b) the expected costs of obtaining answers of each quality. It is possible, of course, that a particular research question may be a good one in the efficiency sense that the expected costs of researching it are less than what the expected benefits would be if the resources devoted to the research were used as productively as possible; yet if the resources were not used so productively, it might fail the allocative efficiency test. Thus, a question could be potentially efficient to research but actually inefficient. In any event, the "best" questions to research are those for which the excess of the value of the expected answers (benefits) over the expected costs of the research are maximized. Deciding which are the "right" questions to research implies a benefit-cost (efficiency) analysis for the prospective project that is essentially the same as for any other resource-using project, such as in water resources or manpower training. Thus, upon careful scrutiny the imaginative effort by the organizers of this session to break a monstrous evaluation task into two distinct evaluations fails to pass the test of separability. Despite my conclusion regarding the simultaneity of judgments on which are the right (best) questions to ask and on the costs and quality of expected answers, I shall proceed. In the remainder of this paper, I try to identify the nature of the research questions *University of Wisconsin-Madison. My thanks go to W. Lee Hansen, Michael Olneck, and Mark Schlesinger for their comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported in part by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of WisconsinMadison by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pursuant to the provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.