Project information
Project manager
Corrado Matta
Other project members
Rosa Runhardt, Radboud Universitet, Nijmegen, Nederländerna
Financier
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
Timetable
September 2024 - May 2025
Subject
Pedagogy (Department of Education and Teacher's Practice, Faculty of Social Sciences)
More about the project
The issue of causation in educational research is hotly debated. Many influential educational theorists have asked whether educational processes are causal to begin with, or whether it is important to focus on the meaning of classroom actions rather than causal relations. Others accept the idea that educational phenomena are causal, but claim that the complexity of educational phenomena makes it virtually impossible to develop acceptable causal models of them. A result of both these critiques has been a growing skepticism among researchers and practitioners towards talk of effects of educational approaches or policies.
In the last decade, philosophers of science have proposed that a plurality of evidence might strengthen causal inference, possibly solving the complexity problem. A popular version of evidential pluralism claims that causal inference requires integrating evidence of correlation (typically found with quantitative methods) and evidence of mechanisms (found with qualitative methods). Questions remain about whether this framework can solve the complexity problem in education, or if it truly implies a pluralistic approach to the concept of evidence.
In this project, we will organize two workshops that will bring together philosophers, methodologists, and educational researchers, and discuss whether the epistemology of educational phenomena essentially requires a pluralist conception of evidence. The workshops will be organized thematically, focusing on conceptual, methodological, and application issues of evidential pluralism. Dates and location for upcoming workshops: September 24-25, 2024, Linnaeus University (Växjö Campus) May 8-9, 2025, Linnaeus University (Växjö Campus)
The project is part of the research in the Studies in Curriculum, Teaching and Evaluation (SITE) research group.
