Educational research: a critique: a survey of published educational research: report presented to OFSTED

David Hargreaves recently sparked debate with his comments criticising educational research for being poor value for money, remote from educational practice, and often of indifferent quality. Prompted by this debate, this research set out to examine a small part of educational research to ascertain the extent to which some of these criticisms could be justified. Its focus was on academic educational research in journals, and aimed to provide, for the interested lay person as well as policy-makers and academics, a snapshot of such research. From the analysis of 41 articles in the light of...  [+] Show more

David Hargreaves recently sparked debate with his comments criticising educational research for being poor value for money, remote from educational practice, and often of indifferent quality. Prompted by this debate, this research set out to examine a small part of educational research to ascertain the extent to which some of these criticisms could be justified. Its focus was on academic educational research in journals, and aimed to provide, for the interested lay person as well as policy-makers and academics, a snapshot of such research. From the analysis of 41 articles in the light of 30 questions, four major themes emerged as worthy of reporting: the partisan researcher, problems of methodology, non-empirical educational research and the focus of educational research. Of the 41 articles, 15 are highlighted as showing good practice, with 26 highlighted as not satisfying criteria of good practice, in terms of certain dimensions of the analysis. Given the seriousness of many of these weaknesses, the tentative conclusion is that there are rather worrying tendencies in a majority of the articles surveyed and that these tendencies will be found throughout this important stand of educational research.