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Measuring the Wrong Things — Has the Scientific Method Been Compromised By Careerism?

Commentary by Downes (Stephen Downes) on , December 15, 2011.

I think this is exactly right: "Perhaps we’re measuring the wrong things — number of publications, number of citations, impact factors of publication outlets — as a way of measuring a scientist’s productivity, which we then reward with money, either directly or indirectly. Perhaps we should measure how many results have been replicated. Without that, we are pursuing a cacophony of claims, not cultivating a world of harmonious truths." It is not, for example, how many publications I can get for developing the nature and form of the MOOC, nor the citations to my works, nor even whether I can raise research money for it. It's whether other people can use the model successfully. The papers and the money are an aid in doing this, a means to an end, not the end in iteself. (Hits Today: 753 Total: 753)

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Re: Measuring the Wrong Things - Has the Scientific Method Been Compromised By Careerism?

Ted Wall, December 15, 2011
Your comment struck a chord with me. Anthony Bryk has written on the need to move university-based research one step further to embedding it in the education system. We are doing so with our work on ICT-supported learning in elementary schools. His four step model - Plan, Study Do Act Model helps people do just that!
Bryk A. S., Gomez L. M., Grunow A. (2010), Getting Ideas Into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education. Available at www.carnegiefoundation.org

Re: Measuring the Wrong Things - Has the Scientific Method Been Compromised By Careerism?

scott HJ, December 18, 2011
A quotation:

"The fourth stage, the question chain, sustains science as a coherent process, erecting continuous, coherent bodies of knowledge. Thus science itself, rather than the will of scientists or the judgements of patrons and great givers, directs its organization, along with providing automatic and continual self-renewal. New questions turning up in the question chain, especially if they are a surprise, return the entire process to its first stage: again, the time is ripe to pose a salient and fruitful question.
If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific. It stagnates. Intellectually, it is poisonous, because thereafter almost everything the stagnated and warped knowledge and warped knowledge touches is harmed by it. Nazi ideologies of race, Marxist ideologies of economics and social utopias, capitalist confusion of commercial competition with Dawrinism, along with the elimination of cooperation from understanding of evolution, are all examples of inquiries claiming scientific validity that were disconnected from the scientific state of mind and sank into dogma." (68 – 69)

Jane Jacobs, "Dark Age Ahead" Random House 2004 ISBN 0-679-31309-5

The surprise that returns the process to its first stage (and spoils your grant).

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