Chapter 10: The Future of Research on Social Studies—for what Purpose?

The quality of the research on social studies education has been criticized frequently and thoroughly over the past 40 years, beginning with Metcalf's (1963) chapter in the Handbook of Research on Teaching. A series of later critics has included Shaver and Larkins (1973), Shaver (1979, 1982a, b), Nelson and Shaver (1985), Fraenkel (1987), and Fraenkel and Wallen (1991). Few elements of the research endeavor have been spared in the various analyses. Among the shortcomings identified have been the pursuit of problems irrelevant to the interests and concerns of school practitioners, weak experimental designs, the lack of adequate reliability and validity evidence for dependent variables and the absence of verification of independent variables, studies of too short duration for the results to be generalized to ongoing schooling, the dearth of replication studies, the inappropriate use of tests of statistical significance, and the failure to attend to educational significance.