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Description: ... on digital learning and literacy
August 5, 2014 by Mark Warschauer
A recent article in Scientific American described how scholars are bringing new rigor to educational research by introducing methods from science and economics. I’m strongly in favor of more rigor in educational research, as well as in the broader social sciences. However, the article itself downplays the challenges involved in this and thus the limitations of experimental research.
This is clearly seen in the lead example discussed in the article, a study by Carnegie Mellon psychologist Anna Fisher and her grad student Karrie Godwin. Fisher noticed that while the walls in her university classroom were barren, a typical elementary classroom was adorned with all kinds of potentially distracting material. So Godwin carried out a small experiment in which two groups of 12 kindergartners listened to three stories about science and then were asked questions on the material. One of the group
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