So I would say that it is very difficult to develop a research method that matches my theory and any curriculum that I create. Life really doesn’t like to fit into neat boxes all the time. Sure, some people are good at re-framing reality to match their theory, but I have never been one to be able to do that. Well, I will when the assignment requires it, but we all know that you have to sell your ontological soul on a regular basis in order to make it through a doctoral degree 🙂 So that really becomes the issue when you go for something more pragmatic or even constructivist in nature. It seems to me that it is a lot easier to get a bunch of numbers out of research. Its more accepted to publish along the lines of behaviorism or even cognitivism it seems. Social constructivism seems hard to prove decisively. People may feel that they constructed knowledge…. but did they really? What if they are really just still operating on programmed responses from the relational stimuli that they were taught growing up?

But, I guess taking a step back, it would be fairly easy to design the research if you had a willing instructor or two. Create lessons that require social interaction to solve an issue, ask a bunch of good qualitative questions, code, and evaluate (that could be the instructional designer in me talking). So I would guess the difficulty comes in convincing the wider academic community to accept your evaluations. Quantitative people would want the numbers, test results, etc. And maybe you can add that in to a social constructivist lesson…. but would that really be the appropriate assessment method? The goal of social constructivism is to construct knowledge together, not individually score well on a pre/post test. So if a constructivist-based lesson produces higher gains in scores, that is more of an interesting byproduct. The real measure of the success of social constructivist-based lesson is the constructed knowledge, something you really can’t quantify. Even when you ask the right questions, you still only get a limited picture into the learner’s minds, which could be biased, distracted, etc. That would seem to be the difficult part – how to turn this research into something that would be beneficial (publishable?) to the field in general. At what point does a constructivist learning study turn from “interesting case study” into “something that others could benefit from learning about”? Maybe figuring that out will be part of the learning curve of becoming a scholar.