Repository | Book | Chapter

It will come as no surprise to those who engage in research on human learning that the field suffers from definitional, conceptual, and methodological disorder (Hancock, 2007). All too often, researchers in this psychological domain use different terms to say essentially the same thing (or use the same term to mean entirely different things), investigate the relation between two or more constructs without a clear rationale or prediction, or use measures divorced from the nature or process of the phenomena under investigation (Marsh & Hau, 2007). Among the symptoms of this disorder are ambiguous terms (Dinsmore, Alexander & Loughlin, 2010), obfuscated constructs (Alexander, Schallert, & Hare, 1991), atheoretical research (Alexander, 2009), and inaccurate or invalid claims (Robinson, Levin, Thomas, Pituch, & Vaughn, 2007). Treatment of this pervasive and complex disorder is no small feat, requiring multidimensional and multiphasic intervention. One important step toward clarity and precision in the research on human learning, however, is being undertaken in this volume, namely untangling and clarifying the relation among paradigm, theory, and model.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-0914-4_15

Full citation: