Addressing an Identity Crisis of a Different Sort: A Response to Berliner’s Call to Action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Educational Psychology as a Policy Science, David expresses a frustration that many of us have felt for a long time: As a discipline, educational psychology has had little impact on educational decision making and policy setting. Decisions about which instructional goals to prioritize, which teaching practices to encourage through training and federal funding, which assessment instruments to employ in measuring student progress and achievement, and so on——such decisions are often made by individuals who have little knowledge or understanding of basic principles of learning, development, and motivation, and little awareness of sound assessment practice. As Berliner points out, the alarm sounded in A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) flies in the face of data indicating that national achievement levels are not declining (e.g., see Berliner & Biddle, 1995). We do, however, have significant that must be addressed. Dropout rates are high, especially in urban and rural areas, and especially for students from low-income families. Some students who graduate have reading and writing skills insufficient for tackling the complex demands of today’s society. Many more do not critically evaluate the things they read and hear. Berliner urges us to enter directly into policy debates, to bring our expertise into the arena of educational decision making. I certainly agree, but I think we can have an even greater impact if we take a hard look at, and then address, the possible reasons why, at present, our discipline is not informing educational practice to the extent that it could or should. In the upcoming sections, I make four points. First, it is our mainstream culture--which includes widely shared beliefs and misconceptions about human nature--that not only guides current educational decision making but also determines the problems that are identified. Second, if concepts and principles of educational psychology are to influence problem identification and inform educational decision making, they must become a part of that mainstream culture. Third, we ourselves may be largely to blame for our current out-of-the-mainstream status. Finally, we ourselves must be the ones to change this state of affairs; I offer my thoughts about what will work--and what probably will not work--in bringing our contributions to the decision-making table.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".