Quality in Research: My Concern

Quality in Research: My Concern

Education is a multidisciplinary subject and its various facets include all those disciplines that have their root in social science, education itself is a social science discipline. It has always been said that education and educational institutes are an essential part of society to such an extent that educational institutes have been referred as mini society by renowned scholars therefore any question pertaining to educational research must take into the consideration the fact that society and social context always influence the type of education a person get, the chance for better education or the quality of education an institute provides.  One of my friend who is a Ph.D. scholar and a teacher at Primary level school at Basic Shiksha Parishad, Uttar Pradesh while discussing his experience at the school and looking for a research problem once asked me “why is it so that the parents of Dalit and minority’s students are so careless about their children’s education? Don’t they have any regard and a sense of duty towards their children and their education?” What startled him was the incapability of class five students not being able to read texts of class two and their inabilities to perform the four basic operations of arithmetic at class five level. According to him the parents were at fault for the low academic achievement of the students and this was his research assumption!  My dear friend did not take into account the social context of those marginalized students; he forgot that for the students whom he was crying must be the first-generation learner belonging to the lowest economic strata of the society, downtrodden by the high inflation and oppressed by the caste system.

In contemporary society the modern secular states or the polity determine the policies. Educational institutes are very potent tool in the hands of the polity which not only perpetuate hegemonic ideologies but also control the discourse on subaltern ideologies in order to maintain the hierarchy of the upper caste and class and the system so deeply entrenched in Indian society. Therefore as per my view if one needs to ensure the very quality of educational research s/he must take into account the socio-political context of education while framing research questions and assumptions.

The other problem which has infected the quality of educational research is the extreme love for behaviorism and positivism. The dilemma of being objective, empirical, value-free, testable, replicable, measurable and controllable characteristics of scientific method had hunted educational research since its inception as a discipline without forgetting that students are human, they have feelings and emotions too and different situations faced by individuals cannot be controlled or replicated under laboratory conditions. No one can exactly assess the behavior of all the students undergoing experiment/treatment/manipulation how so ever controlled and reduced the extraneous variables are. The educational researches which are “largely behaviorist in its psychology and positivist in its philosophy” (Lather, 1992) may not guarantee the quality we are seeking.