Overview
Education, Research and Educology (2016) addresses what Christensen regards as the most practically important application of the educological framework: the evaluation of educational research. If educology consists of verified true statements about educational phenomena, then the central activity of educational scholarship is verification — the critical examination of candidate statements to determine whether they satisfy the conditions required for their type. This book details what those conditions are and how they apply.
Verification by Necessity Reasoning
Analytic statements in educology — statements about the meanings of educational terms and the logical relations among educational concepts — are verified by necessity reasoning: deduction, definition, and conceptual analysis. A statement is analytically verified if it follows necessarily from the definitions of the terms it employs. The test for analytic statements is not empirical adequacy but logical necessity: does the statement follow from the relevant definitions? Could it be false, given those definitions?
Many statements that appear in educational discourse as if they were empirical findings are in fact analytic truths or analytic falsehoods — statements whose truth or falsity is determined by the meanings of their terms, not by observation. Recognizing this does not make them unimportant; analytic clarification is essential to educational inquiry. But it does mean that they cannot be verified or refuted by collecting data, and that treating them as if they were empirical claims generates pseudo-controversies that no amount of research can resolve.
Verification by Normative Reasoning
Normative statements in educology — evaluations of educational processes, outcomes, and institutions — are verified by normative reasoning: the specification and justification of values, the application of those values to concrete cases, and the critical examination of the value premises on which normative conclusions depend. A normative statement is verified to the extent that the values on which it rests are made explicit and defensible, and the reasoning from those values to the conclusion is logically sound.
Christensen emphasizes that normative verification does not mean that all normative views are equally valid. Some normative arguments are better reasoned than others; some value premises are more defensible than others. Normative reasoning is genuine reasoning, subject to standards of logical rigor and consistency. But those standards are different from the standards appropriate to empirical inquiry, and confusing them produces errors in both directions: treating normative claims as if they were empirical (the naturalistic fallacy) and treating empirical claims as if they settled normative questions (scientism).
Verification by Systematic Observation
Empirical statements in educology — statements about what educational phenomena are, how they occur, and what effects they produce — are verified by systematic observation: survey research, experiment, case study, ethnography, and the other methods of social scientific inquiry. The standards of empirical verification are those of rigorous social science: validity and reliability of measurement, appropriate sampling, control of confounding variables, replication, and peer review.
Christensen's distinctive contribution to the methodology of educational research is not to introduce new methods but to specify the conditions under which each type of method is appropriate. Empirical methods are appropriate only to empirical questions; applying them to analytic or normative questions produces results that are both epistemically unjustified and practically misleading.