The Sad State of Educational Research

Posted by Mark Bullen on September 1 2011 at 11:32 p.m.

 <br /><div class="MsoNormal">After four years of digging into the digital native/net generation/millennial learner rhetoric, I have come to a distressing conclusion. The main culprits in promoting and perpetuating the unfounded claims and stereotypes are not just the pundits and commentators who started this ball rolling but educational researchers who have accepted and repeated these claims without subjecting them to the critical scrutiny you would expect.   </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So what we have is a process that begins with somebody making an unfounded claim that has resonance and at first glance seems to make sense (young people have been exposed to digital technology from birth so they must technologically fluent and educators need to respond this). Educators then repeat this claim and begin to frame research according to this unfounded perspective. Other researchers then cite the research of their colleagues which is based on these unfounded claims and pretty soon the original unfounded claims have been virtually accepted as self-evident truths.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span>This was brought to light quite vividly as I read the newly-published article, </span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_378561275"><i><span>PowerPoint and Learning Theories: Reaching Out to the Millennials</span></i></a><span><a href="http://kwantlen.ca/TD/TD.5.1/TD.5.1.7_Gardner&amp;Aleksejuniene_PPT&amp;Learning_Theories.pdf"> </a>by Karen Gardner and J</span><span>olanta Aleksejuniene. Their study attempted to map student preferences for Power Point styles with Cognitive Load, Multimedia and Visual Learning Theories. Nothing wrong with this except their rationale was couched in the now discredited and unfounded millennial learner discourse: <i>“</i></span><i><span>As millennials, today’s students are independent, inclusive (move between global and virtual communities), opinionated and aware, investigative (use technology), and expect immediacy (information at light speed) (Lippincott, 2010)… There is a developing awareness that millennial students consider technology central to communication. As we continue to introduce technology into our teaching and learning, it behooves us to make this form of communication as effective as possible.”</span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt;"><span>I thought I had read almost everything that had been written on this issue but I wasn’t familiar with the author that </span><span>Gardner and </span><span>Aleksejuniene</span><span> cited to support their claim: Lippincott. &nbsp;So before I jumped to conclusions I thought I should check the Lippincott article (<a href="http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/WJLA">Informationcommons: Meeting millennials, needs. Journalof Library Administration, 50(1), 27-37</a>) to see if she had conducted some research that supported this claim or at least cited some research I was not aware of. What I found was more of the same. No original research but rather the repetition of the unfounded claims made by the usual sources like Prensky, Palfrey &amp; Gasser and Oblinger &amp; Oblinger to support her conclusion that this generation has distinctive learning styles, is fluent with digital technology, and is able to multitask efficiently. Based on this she concludes: <i>“l</i></span><i><span>ibraries need to understand the style of their net generation students to provide environments conducive to engagement and learning; these include how libraries present access to their collections and licensed materials, how they instruct students, how they promote services, and how they configure their spaces.” </span></i><span>But what about <a href="http://digitallearners.wordpress.com/tools-resources/">all the research th

Original Post: http://www.netgenskeptic.com/2011/09/sad-state-of-educational-research.html

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