Imprimaturs and Making Science More Useful

Imprimaturs are important. Who will emboss my article with the seal of an official publication?

If you want a grant from a national agency or an article in a top journal, you usually need to fit the (systematic, rigorous) exploration of knowledge into a 'scientific' formation: what the field already knows about the question, hypotheses to be tested, possible outcomes. But not all scientific knowledge works like that!

I really liked Clark & Primo's op-ed in the New York Times advocating a broader vision of what social science is trying to achieve. They cite Ronald Giere, saying "the test of a map lies not in arbitrarily checking random points but in whether people find it useful to get somewhere."

How well do our ways of organizing our studies match what we are trying to get out of them?

In education, we are often advocating practices without looking at the whole system. What happens in a school is so complex, and is enormously influenced by broader inequalities and people's and communities' access to cultural and social resources. So teaching different kinds of students can't follow a cookie-cutter pattern.

[SIDEBAR: **The tough part of analyzing education comes from expecting the same outcome for students (e.g. mastering trigonometry or attending a four-year college) when they come with different bundles of skills and are actually headed down different paths. When do we allow expectations to change ("if you want to do that career, then you should..."), and how much do we force students to stay locked in to a given career track? How can we promise all kids growth and satisfaction? **]

When we talk about studies on healthy lifestyles, we often say, "Oh, carbs are bad for you" or "Coffee is bad for you" but those things really depend on your lifestyle. If you are a marathoner, you should probably eat bread and more bread. If you are a more sedentary person, you should probably eat more fruits and vegetables! What if there are few grocery stores near my house, or the price is too expensive compared to Chef Boyardee Raviolis? To get at the individual takeaways and the structural takeaways, we need longitudinal surveys and some exploratory ethnography!