Norman Edmund’s Educational Blog

Groucho Marx is reported to have said “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies.”
To be fair to educational researchers, many do a good job. But then they suffer, for their work goes into the general literature along with much unreliable research, and people don’t […]

But still doesn’t recognize the scientific method.
Project 2061 has been financed by grants from the National Science Foundation and a few other foundations. It recently celebrated its 20th anniversary with a gathering of congressmen and project participants.
Project 2061 was started by Dr. F. James Rutherford, a former Harvard professor, and has never included teaching what […]

But what about the social sciences?
In the New Scientist (9/24/05), Ray Kurzweil, who received the U.S. National Medal of Technology, forecast the immense progess that will be made technologically. He said, “We won’t experience 100 years of technological advance in the 21st century; we will witness in the order of 20,000 years of progress when […]

Ask the National Academy of Sciences leaders, and they will tell you that there is a culture of science that scientists follow.
Ask the leaders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and they will tell you that there are many different forms of observation, measurement, and study design. For that reason, we don’t […]

This is a report I prepared on the relationship of the above to the scientific method.
On January 23, 2002 Congress passed H.R. 3801, the Educational Sciences Reform Act, “to provide for improvement of Federal education research, statistics, evaluation, information, and dissemination, and for other purposes.” The act established the Institute of Education Sciences in the […]

On Wednesday, January 18, I discussed hands-on, inquiry and discovery teaching needs the scientific method. The Thursday, January 19 issue of The Wall Street Journal has a good article on p. A-9 by Robert Tomsho on hands-on, inquiry teaching vs. direct instruction of subject matter, entitled “What’s the Right Formula?”
This question has been debated continually […]

The scientific method (SM-14) is a basic guide to originating, refining, extending, and applying knowledge in all fields. This is essentially the objective of information reporting. SM-14 is not a method for trite or formula stories. It is a flexible method with no rigid steps or rules. It calls for creative, in-depth reporting and scholarly […]

Children love inquiry, discovery, and hands-on learning, and most research has shown that they express a greater interest in science when these methods are used. However, because of the controversies surrounding it, the scientific method is seldom taught, even though it is the method of inquiry, the method of discovery, the method by which scientifically […]

The scientific method has been termed the greatest discovery of science. It is the way we get scientifically based research and scientifically valid research. Based on what has been accomplished in all fields by following the stages of this method, it certainly is difficult to dispute that claim. It is not well known that this […]

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), a professor of philosophy at the University of California, gained fame for his saying “anything goes.” In his book Against Method (1988) he espouses many concepts. My many years of research in the scientific method allow me to comment only on his theories about method.
In Against Method, Feyerabend says, “The idea of […]