Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch

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Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch


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who seek to establish that significance.9

      In other words, falsification of a theory or hypothesis is not the end of an enquiry, but a prompt for further investigation and more refined explanation. While it is wrong to put poorly evidenced empirical theories into practice, it cannot be an objection to EER as such that it is fallible and often falsified. In this respect it is much like other forms of scientific enquiry. As we shall see, however, in later chapters, there is a need to have a clearer account for what counts as criteria for truth in educational research and also for the standard of warrant needed (and the necessary qualifications) for accepting that research has a bearing on educational practice.

       The Problem of Context and How to Interpret It

      An explanatory field covers a range of situations in which explanations of a certain kind are valid. What we mean by a valid explanation will become clearer in the following two chapters. Causal fields are explanation relative. They are specified in terms of the phenomena to be explained. Thus, to use Mackie’s examples, a house and its history will be the relevant causal field when explaining the cause of the fire in the house. Exposure to a virus may have the causal field of human beings when investigating the conditions in which the viruses are present. However, when investigating the conditions under which the virus is contracted, we may restrict the field to those human beings who contract the virus. Sometimes the causal field can be very broad: explaining the influence of gravity on physical entities will take the known universe as its causal field, on the background assumption of uniform influence of gravity across it.

      What are the issues that need to be taken into account when delineating explanatory fields? The first is researcher intention, which will specify the range of phenomena of interest. Thus an investigation of the efficacy of a method of teaching reading for young children may be quite general, and apply to all practices which use an alphabetical script. In such a case the explanatory field covers the teaching reading practices (and, probably, associated factors) in societies which use alphabetic scripts. It is more likely, however, that concern will be focused on one particular writing system, say English, in which case the causal field will be those teaching reading practices that involve the English-spelling system. It is also quite possible that the explanatory field will be teaching reading practices in a particular local authority, as in the West Dunbartonshire study already mentioned (MacKay 2006). This is by no means to say that other studies in other explanatory fields may not be drawn on in constructing an explanation in this case, but other results and explanations require interpretation in the context of a new explanatory field.

      One could argue that this should not be possible. Since the work of Fisher, R.A. (1935) experimentation has involved randomisation of a population sample prior to assignment to treatment and control groups. This supersedes the earlier procedure of controlling for all known


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