The biggest problem with educational research is that there is simply too much of it out there. Education research, after all, is a requirement for anyone going to graduate school in education. This means that every highly qualified teacher has their own education philosophy and has done their own education studies. If you are at all familiar with the way things work in the public schools, you will know that every six months to three years, there is a new educational philosophy that comes through. Someone’s research on education queues them in to a new approach to some core skill or knowledge base. All of a sudden, all the schools are catching on to a new way of writing a five paragraph thesis, a different method for teaching math, or even a new approach to reading education.

Sorting out the wheat from the chaff is no easy matter. Ultimately, educational research has to be put into place in the classroom. There are thousands of different ways to teach a class. No one way is necessarily correct for every given situation. It is the role of the teacher to try out different methods in his or her classroom and see which works the best for the students. It is results, after all, that matter. Philosophy is only of secondary importance.

Of course, researching education is extremely important for a teacher’s professional development. Educational research is not always useful as a product, but it is always useful as an activity. The more you research education, the more you understand how the mind works. It is easy for teachers – even good teachers – to get stuck in a rut. They find an approach that works and don’t innovate for years and years. By doing some educational research, they might suddenly get an idea. A teaching strategy that didn’t strike them as old before will suddenly seem outdated.

Although not all of it is good, ultimately educational research is good for society. It is too easy for people to get stuck in ideas of how children should learn, how they should behave, and what works for them. Society always has values about how to teach the youth, but those values do not always keep up with scientific standards. Science, not cultural biases, should be our model in the schools. This is what educational research is so good for. Through it, little by little, society improves each generation as the students learn more effectively.