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Record W3151461137

The Quest for Meaning in Educational Research

2004· article· en· W3151461137 on OpenAlex
Deborah

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAcademic exchange quarterly · 2004
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicEducator Training and Historical Pedagogy
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMeaning (existential)SociologyEpistemologyPsychologyPedagogyPhilosophy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article explores different senses of the concept of meaning in educational research, presenting 'meaning' as personal (the researcher's quest for meaning through research), contextual (meaning in relation to linguistics and culture) and shared (through communication), offering illustrative examples from the literature and from her own work. ********** Why Do We Perform Educational Research? When I was finishing my undergraduate degree in anthropology thirty years ago, the professor of our cultural anthropology course gave us a provocative assignment for our final paper. We were supposed to ask, and attempt to answer, one of the great, unanswered questions in cultural anthropology. Flirting with youthful cynicism on the one hand, and beginning a genuine search for meaning on the other, I entitled my paper, One of the great, unanswered questions in cultural anthropology: Why are we doing The details of my answer are long forgotten in the dustbin of essay history, but the gist of it was an attempt to find human significance in the description and analysis of cultures. Looking back, I blush at the naive presumption that I could answer such a question, but the question itself, why are we doing has recurred, sometimes at a hum and sometimes at a roar, for most of my professional life. Why, collectively, do we perform educational research? At first glance the answers seem clear. We want to learn about effective programs and teaching methods to help students learn. We want to discover relationships between variables in educational settings to plan interventions. We want to understand cultural contexts of schools to create schools that embody justice and reduce prejudice and inequality. From the individual researcher's perspective we investigate topics about which we are curious or passionate; as well, we do research because it is an integral part of the academic role and a central factor in academic promotion. We may sometimes be paid or co-opted to do research in a setting that we did not choose out of personal-professional interest, but I think examination of most researchers' work over years or decades will offer substantial revelation of what is important to those people. A researcher's voyage may be long, the seas calm or stormy, the tides of circumstance insistent, but the journey is driven at least in part by the winds of ontological longing. Individually and collectively, we do educational research as part of a quest for meaning. Meaning is Personal Most difficult to define, what might be called ontological meaning involves the individual quest to find and make meaning in the daily activities of one's life. It is the quest to answer the individual form of the question posed in my forgotten essay. Why am I doing this? Why am I living my life this way, taking this path and not some other? It may be a useful kind of reflection for a researcher to examine the motivations and turning points in his or her career trajectory. In my own case, since I came to live in Israel my quest for meaning has become sharper, more urgent, the motivation for doing research more keenly focused. Moving from crisis to tragedy to crisis in this tiny country, I want my work to mean something, to me, to my grandchildren, to others. For the first time, I am an outsider, trying to find my way in, rather than a native taking so much for granted. When I lived in Canada my concerns were related but different; in a less intense setting I sought through research to understand teachers' knowledge and the nature of school culture. Now I ask, what happens in schools in this region? How do we teach about violence and non-violence, about respect, courage and difficult decisions? What is the role of schools in this regard, and can schools counteract other influences? At every stage human beings seek to animate the details of their lives with spirit, with connection. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.693
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.300
GPT teacher head0.496
Teacher spread0.196 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it