ABSTRACT
Among other things, life is full of assumptions, and I would like to begin by announcing one assumption about which I have a certain amount of doubt, but which is necessary to make if I am going to get on with this talknamely, that there is such a field as educational research and that it has something useful to do other than to improve its own methodology. Several years ago I taught one of my graduate classes in educational research to distinguish among several varieties of research: methodological, measurement, survey, correlational, and experimental treatment research. I then sent them to the library to classify articles in selected educational research journals. Nearly 50 percent of the articles scanned were of a purely methodological character involving no empirical data, - dealing with such things as new statistical formulas, new methods of scoring tests, or new methods of computation and data handling. Perhaps the situation has improved in the last few years, but at the time I was struck with the enormous fondness that educational researchers seemed to have for statistics and methodology; they were almost afraid to touch ground and get their hands dirty with data. Obviously, developing new methodologies and new statistical formulas is not going to change the world very much, nor even influence the process of education, which I take to be the proper concern of educational research.
