Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

228 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
tightly controlled context that was devoid of any moral, social, economic, or political factors and
conditions that mediated and informed the knowledge in real life. A decontextualized curriculum
places the emphasis for a student’s educational needs, knowledge, and achievement solely on
the individual, thus denying all of the other factors that contribute to the student’s social status,
intelligence testing results, and educational achievement.
Thorndike’s Influence on the Acquisition of Knowledge
How knowledge is acquired affects the nature of knowledge. For instance, if what is considered
true knowledge can be acquired only through one view on knowledge and the methods of
its acquisition, then all other knowledge about a phenomenon acquired through other methods of
inquiry is considered less valuable knowledge, or even false knowledge. Currently in education,
there is a sharp divide between those who view quantitative inquiry and qualitative inquiry as
exclusive methods of knowledge acquisition. A recent movement towards a mixed methodology,
or the use of multiple inquiry methods (i.e., both quantitative and qualitative in all of their diverse
forms) is attempting to bridge this divide in order to gain a more holistic and realistic understanding
of educational phenomena. Until the last decade or two, quantitative methods of inquiry
dominated education’s attempt to develop effective curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Despite
the ascendance of qualitative methodologies in the late 1980s and 1990s, with the No Child
Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) quantitative methods are regaining their former position of
dominance. In essence, the reductionist and empirical research that characterizes quantitative inquiry
is representative of the formal philosophy of inquiry that only accepts empirical knowledge
as valid knowledge. In contrast, postformal methods of inquiry attempt to capture the full and
often hidden contexts of an educational phenomenon through their use of diverse and multiple
forms of inquiry. Postformal methods value all forms of knowledge as valid in relation to their
contribution to the holistic understanding of a phenomenon.
The work of Thorndike was instrumental in ensuring the dominance of quantitative inquiry.
Through his early preeminence in educational psychology, Thorndike’s precise scientific experimental
processes, which relied upon statistical measurement, became the accepted academic
process for knowledge acquisition. As the father of the measurement movement (Lagemann,
2000), Thorndike’s influence has been greatly seen in the consistent use of standardized tests
to determine student ability, achievement, and position in education. Large-scale assessment of
students continues to be used not only as indicators of student success in all levels of education
but also as indicators of the effectiveness of teachers and school administrators. The empirical
assessments that Thorndike helped to initiate and promote have proven very effective in the
ranking and sorting of students within educational contexts, in the construction of curriculum and
assessment, and in the management of schools.
Many individuals have contested the equity of these assessments in making decisions about
students, curriculum and instruction, and schools. One of their arguments is that despite their
functional effectiveness, standardized assessments do not take into account all of the factors that
determine student success, effective curriculum and instruction, and the ability of schools to meet
the diverse needs of their students. As previously mentioned, standardized assessments decontextualize
the act of assessment. What this means is that when students are assessed through SAT,
GRE, MAT, or state standardized tests, they are assessed in a narrowly defined representation
of the tested knowledge. Through the statistical procedures developed by individuals such as
Thorndike, attempts are made to statistically control for other variables such as socioeconomic
status, test bias, test anxiety, and a plethora of other variables that do affect a student’s performance.
This debate over decontextualized assessments versus holistic assessments that seek
out the additional contexts that affect student performance has been greatly renewed with the
implementation of NCLB.