Take my paradigm … please! The legacy of Kuhn’s construct in educational research

Abstract

Thomas Kuhn developed the construct of research paradigms to make sense of the history of conceptual change in the physical sciences. The construct has since been appropriated by a number of academic fields and by non‐academics as well. This paper traces the use of the construct in the educational research field. The bulk of the paper is organized around two questions: (a) Was it ever appropriate to characterize the educational research field’s acceptance of qualitative methods as equivalent to one of Kuhn’s paradigm revolutions? (b) Is paradigm talk appropriate today?

Notes

1. A concern with public relations may not be just a recent phenomenon in the educational research field. One or the reviewers of this article speculated that educational researchers’ initial interest in paradigm talk can be explained, in part, by physics envy. This reviewer noted: ‘It was fun to point and say, “We must be important because look, this paradigm stuff happens in our field, too.”’

2. Interestingly, Erickson, himself, seemed reluctant to employ Kuhn’s term even though he clearly invoked Kuhn’s incommensurablity notion. Erickson’s reticence to characterize the theoretical presuppositions he alluded to as paradigms may have been prompted by reading the Shulman chapter.

3. The paper in this issue by Peter Demerath suggests that Erickson has recently muddied the waters a bit by talking of ‘local causality.’ It seems obvious, however, that Erickson’s use of such language represents nothing more than an attempt to make interpretive research palatable to policy‐makers focused on the ‘what works?’ question.

4. In a footnote on page 25 of Scientific research in education, the authors acknowledge this fact, which makes their cavalier dismissal of challenges to traditional objectivity appear all the more a violation of the scientific norms to which the authors and the National Academy of Sciences claim to be committed.

5. Gene Glass, when asked about the federal government’s push for randomized experiments in an interview published in the Educational Researcher, stated: ‘I am sympathetic with the FDA’s requirement for randomized clinical drug trials. But that hardly justifies the reliance on a single method for the verification or discovery of claims in the soft sciences. And where is the randomized experiment that proves that randomized experiments are the royal road to truth? There is none, of course…. If the federal government wishes to be consistent (a dubious assumption), then they will have to back off their policies on smoking, coal dust, speeding on the interstate highways, and a host of other things that have never been verified by randomized experiments’ (Glass in Robinson, 2004, p. 26).