I think there were a lot of terms thrown around in the conversation that really need to be unpacked as far as what was meant. For me, I’m not sure if I can really agree that we can label an entire body of research “mostly irrelevant” or “mostly relevant” for that matter. I think about it this way: 99.99% of all medical research is completely irrelevant to me… until… I get sick with something new, or injure something… and then a slice of that research that was previously irrelevant to me is suddenly very, very relevant. Or if I need a surgery, suddenly a lot of research in 10 different fields of study within medical research suddenly becomes very, very relevant to me.

Research is a very contextual activity, and even then each individual study is only going to be relevant to very specific contexts. Once you get to larger ideas like “self-regulation,” you might say “well, the research on that is very relevant,” but we are saying that more out of a popularity contest based on the amount of research that has gone into that topic versus other areas that are also very important but just not as researched. So how close does relevancy get to popularity before we say “well, it should be about what really matters and not what gets the most attention.”

But then the related problem is that during the session we discuss that most educational research is crap and then five minutes later touch on the idea of self-regulated learning as if it were a settled deal that it is important to education. But how do we know that it is? Well, a huge chunk of that “crap” research says it is. Most of our assumptions and side comments and main points even are so steeped in the constructs of what research has proven is valid already. Saying that most research is crap usually gets contradictory within a few minutes – until we really unpack what is meant by that. Which is obviously hard to do in a quick VC session.

So, for me, I think we really need to prove that we can accurately uses such broad stroke classifications of educational research in the first place – relevant, irrelevant, crap, good, etc – for more than individual studies as applied in individual contexts. Can we really say “most educational research is irrelevant” or “most educational research is relevant” or “most educational research is crap” or “most educational research is good”? Are those assessment fair or too broad because of context?