When Are Prescriptive Statements in Educational Research Justified?

Abstract

A prescriptive statement is a recommendation that, if a course of action is taken, then a desirable outcome will likely occur. For example, in reading research recommending that teachers apply an intervention targeted at a specific reading skill to improve children's reading performance is a prescriptive statement. In our view, these statements require thorough scientific understanding of causal relationships that follow from scientifically credible research and are generalizable across varied contexts. In this article, we consider both epistemological issues and research credibility indicators (i.e., internal and external validity issues) that restrict one's ability to make prescriptive statements. After presenting an argument for why prescriptive statements should be made sparingly, we describe a stage model of programmatic educational intervention research that is analogous to medical research's phase model and which emphasizes the importance of including appropriate comparison groups, observing replicated findings across different populations and situational contexts, demonstrating statistical relationships between interventions and outcomes, accounting for and ruling out potential alternative explanations for obtained effects, and ultimately conducting randomized field trials. We conclude with the prescriptive statement that only after achieving these high standards of research credibility should educational researchers offer prescriptive statements.Prescriptive statements are consumer-directed recommendations that follow the pattern, "If persons take Action X, then Situation Y will improve" (Robinson et al. 2007;Shaw et al. 2010). 1 These statements are comparable to a doctor saying, "If you take amoxicillin, then Educ Psychol Rev (2011) 23:197-206

Understanding Urban Teachers’ Perceptions for Professional Development in Classroom Management

“…The sample was selected because of the request of the two principals for the researchers to provide support in the development of PD opportunities for their respective schools. Given that the sample may not be representative of all populations of teachers, the results of the study may not generalize to all urban schools and should be interpreted with caution (Marley & Levin, 2011). However, the results are compelling and should be considered for replication and extension with samples from other urban districts.…”

“…In addition, five items measuring the value of PD for classroom management were added. As a result of the pilot study, wording and survey items were further modified and refined to further align the items with the research questions of this study (Marley, 2010;Marley & Levin, 2011).…”

When is It Acceptable to Make Prescriptive Statements in Educational Research Articles? Commentary on the Special Issue Papers

“…I think so. According to Marley and Levin (2011), the gold standard for making prescriptive statements is achieving the greatest possible degree of certainty that we have incontrovertible evidence that intervention A leads to outcome B. The ideal way to do so is through carefully controlled experiments, that are repeated independently a number of times with the same results, under a wide range of conditions that address questions about the ability to logically accept the conclusions of the experiments and to generalize the results of the experiments to the people (e.g., students, teachers), places (e.g., schools), and contexts (e.g., curriculum, learning materials, language of instruction) that are described.…”

“…The ideal way to do so is through carefully controlled experiments, that are repeated independently a number of times with the same results, under a wide range of conditions that address questions about the ability to logically accept the conclusions of the experiments and to generalize the results of the experiments to the people (e.g., students, teachers), places (e.g., schools), and contexts (e.g., curriculum, learning materials, language of instruction) that are described. As Marley and Levin (2011) argue, this is not easily done, a lot of overlapping and converging evidence is needed to be assured of the strength of the claims being made, patience is needed, but patience is often sorely lacking in the report of educational research, so that there exist many unwarranted prescriptive claims in published educational research.…”

“…Several of the articles address the different philosophical beliefs and traditions that underlie different research approaches, as in the essays by Nolen and Talbert (2011), Sun andPan 2011, andMarley andLevin (2011). Several of the articles take detailed looks at particular quantitative approaches to research and the conditions, within these approaches, that best lend themselves to prescriptive statements, such as the discussion of Martin (2011) of structural equation modeling, the discussion of O'Connell and Gray (2011) of logistic regression models, and consideration of Brown and Wilson (2011) of measurement issues in cognitive assessment.…”