Education Research: An Investment in our Future?

I started reading a blog post by my team mate Ashley called Let's talk about replication. It was brought to her attention that only 0.13% of education research now is being replicated, and slightly more than 50% of those are actually considered quality research...

As I read through her post I chuckled immensely, as our undergraduate background is quite similar. I too had a zoology degree, and have spent countless hours replicating experiments that were written out to me, and when results from my experiment deviated from the original study, I was supposed to critically analyse that might have happened (I think my TA could only tolerate so many explanations due to human errors). Like Ashley, I also had the idea that replicating experiment was critical, as we were always told to design our experiments so that it was replicable. So the statistics of this study really caught me by surprise.

I would like to think that education design would be a hot research topic; afterall, we are only investing in laying the foundations for many generations to come, but Ashley's discovery suggested otherwise. I am deeply concerned, because there is an urgent need for education systems to evolve and be reformed. Major cities around the world are all struggling for a solution for stressed teachers and oversized classes. Student retention rates at post-secondary institutions have room for improvement. Students are more distracted now than ever with the accessibility of technology and mobile devices at and outside of school, and as I mentioned in my first post, students are quickly changing the way they study! Our education system seems soon to go obsolete, as traditional instruction methods are no longer enough to satisfy our students' appetite. While all signs point to "online learning" and "learning technology" as the next miracle product to solve the world's academic hunger issues, studies that uses action research methodologies performed just 3 years ago in the field of technology may reflect very little truth in how people behave around technology today.

Don't get me wrong, previous research is definitely critical in raising questions and finding out the direction that subsequent studies should follow, with results the studies expects to find, but I think the key here really is subsequent studies to follow - if we don't replicate studies and improve on them, we won't be able to find answers to good questions that were raised, and we cannot correctly identify opportunities to improve our education. We need to invest time and money into tweaking and evolving the commodity that gives us the most return, our next generation!