Paradigm Wars Revisited: A Cartography of Graduate Research in the Field of Education (1980–2010)

Abstract

Education entails conflicting perspectives about its subject matter. In the late 1980s, the conflict developed into a war between interpretive and causal paradigms. Did the confrontation result in a balance between these warring sides? We use text analysis to identify research trends in 137,024 dissertation abstracts from 1980 to 2010 and relate these to students’ academic employment outcomes. Topics associated with the interpretive approach rose in popularity, while the outcomes-oriented paradigm declined. Academic employment remained stably associated with topics in the interpretive approach, but their effect is moderated by the prestige of the students’ institutions. The relation between topic popularity and employability provides insight into field change and how the benefits of cultural shifts fall along the lines of institutional power.

Content Analysis of Textbooks via Natural Language Processing: Findings on Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Texas U.S. History Textbooks

“…NLP methods are popular in computational social science (see also Nguyen, 2017; O’Connor et al, 2011), and they have yielded important insights on textual data in the field of education. For example, they have been used to analyze online and in-person class discussions (Fesler et al, 2019; Lugini et al, 2018), topics in dissertation abstracts (Munoz-Najar Galvez et al, 2019), and disciplinary differences in students’ academic writing (Crossley et al, 2017). A variety of NLP tools, such as Coh-Metrix (Graesser et al, 2014; McNamara et al, 2014), the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Text Cohesion (TAACO; Crossley et al, 2016), and ReaderBench (Dascalu et al, 2014), have been used to characterize text cohesion, difficulty, and complexity in learning analytics and education data mining (Crossley & Kyle, 2018).…”

Mapping the field of psychology: Trends in research topics 1995–2015

“…The psychological discourse is simply too broad to comprehend for individual scholars, "that an entire team of researchers working for several years could only map a fraction of all the texts, transcripts, or archives that define them" (Bail 2014, 469). Fortunately, computational linguistics provides the means to reconstruct the history of a field (Anderson et al 2012;Munoz-Najar Galvez et al 2020), explain scientists' choice of research strategy (Foster et al 2015), and model scientific discovery (Shi et al 2015). A central feature of computational linguistics is the development of impersonal and automatic procedures that offer a more objective and top-down view compared with earlier attempts to map academic fields by insiders (Buurma 2015, 3).…”

Moving Beyond the Paradigm Wars: Emergent Approaches for Education Research

“…I n 2002, the National Research Council (NRC) released a report that articulated its vision about education research (Eisenhart & Towne, 2003;Feuer et al, 2002), which focused on scientifically based research methods. The release of the report was followed by an extensive debate and is broadly understood as part of the long-standing "paradigm war" 1 in the field (Fischman & Tefera, 2014;Munoz-Najar Galvez et al, 2019).…”

“…It is hard to assess to what extent the paradigm war in education research is over (Munoz-Najar Galvez et al, 2019), but we are convinced it is necessary to move beyond it in the service of answering urgent and compelling questions for the field. This move is important because the landscapes where education research occurs have become even more complicated due in part-but not limited to-the emergence of novel knowledge infrastructures, new developments in information and communication technologies, as well as political, scientific, and cultural changes.…”