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Tanya Evans's avatar

Thanks for your work on this. My PhD student researching affect also looked into the references for this claim and came to the same conclusion. This is just the tip of the iceberg...

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DC's avatar

In my recent experience with a Masters of Teaching I came to a similar conclusion about the quality of a lot of education research. It seems rife with problematic research design, and small sample sizes, often a N of 1, from which later research references and makes broad claims. It struck me that the whole tertiary education field operates on an incentive to make novel and interesting claims that contribute toward the fight against the spectre of neoliberalism. This then results in equity-focused, hyper-inclusive, wellbeing-obsessed ideas being produced and supported by previous specious research, that seek to undermine many of the practices that we know lead to better outcomes for the majority of students.

While I admit that I lack the references to substantiate this claim, if I write it in my diary, apparently it can constitute the body of evidence from which I can produce a paper to enshrine this as gospel.

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