What is most amusing about Peter's article is that he is a classic example of the type of teacher that the mentioned ARC project is trying to reach. How can one lambast the research work of another when they quite clearly have no understanding of what they are critiquing! I'm not doing research in education - in the sciences actually - but I can still work out that the ARC project Peter has used as the almighty proof that all education research is useless, is aimed at helping a teacher/lecturer to resolve a conflicting personal ideology with what they're actually being asked to teach. Fairly important I would have thought. How does one's religious beliefs for example, allow them to teach sex education and not feel compromised. Not all education is maths and physics. Peter, being the empiricist that he is however, probably still thinks the earth is flat and that no age-old theory need ever be questioned. And all those high-minded education academics .. Peter must HATE that they get to to tell him how to be a more exciting lecturer. Practice the art of reflection Peter...

Audrey's ad hominem attack is not particularly helpful. What about addressing the assertion that standards have undoubtedly dropped in an area that Peter Ridd clearly is qualified to talk about, his core research and teaching area of maths and physics? Is there objective evidence to support this assertion?

Audrey,

Thanks for the translation of the research definition. If that's what the project is about, it sems fine. However, I went back to try to match your translation to the original and I still have a fair bit of difficulty doing so. It seems to me that the project could be a lot more general than yor interpretation.

I think that no discipline, whether physics, education, cosmology or anything else does itself much of a favour when it buries itself completely in its own language. I accept that physicists will talk in equations when they are discussing the more complex areas of their field with other physicists, and educators will also make use of a lot of concepts well known in their field to simplify discussion amongst themseleves. However, when addressing the wider community, I think all disciplines have the obligation to talk the language of that community - to do anything else is, amongst other things, impolite. It invites a negative reaction and usually gets it.
Science is actually well served at the moment with writers and journalists who understand the science and can explain it in general terms to those who are not experts. Fields like education need to do the same thing. If they are, can you point out to us where we can get ready access to that type of explanation?

The key point in this piece is "The current debate on literacy is evidence that it is difficult to tell if current educational theory has improved anything."

Consider the current debate at the political level and in the general media about economics and infrastructure provision/skill shortages, immigration and asylum seekers and border protection and mandatory detention, criminology and prisons, welfare and homeless people, transport and health. Indeed most areas. Evidence as to whether research assists public policy is not to be found in such places.

That a scientist at a university, a domain where research on leadership and management and organizational reform, on history and the development of ideas is similarly lacking from public debate, should question the value of educational research represents a level of ignorance that ought not to be allowed to go unchallenged in the strongest possible terms.

The common theme is that the findings of quality research in any area seem to take years to get through to the decisions made by governments and even major organizations, including education departments.

There is substantial very high quality research in education in Australia and in the United States where in particular the most horrendous decisions are being made.

Spend a bit of time doing research on it Peter. Use a good search engine! Think about how public policy is developed. Try reading Don Watson's "Confessions of a Bleeding Heart" or the new book on James Galbraith to see what happens at the political level and how available knowledge is considered.

When you have done that Peter and cried into your drink every bloody evening at the shocking ignorance of those who seem to have most influence and the outrageous results that ignorance imposes on every one of us in every aspect of our lives, then have another go at an opinion!

By the way technology has not improved every aspect of how we live our lives. Think about what is reported every week about the modern workplace and stress on ordinary people.

I did a PhD in physics and also later a graduate certificate in higher education, although I became a software engineer in between times. Whilst I felt that the course could have been more succinct, I can say that it was extremely rewarding not just for educating in better ways, but also recognising what it means to facilitate learning in many different ways and situations --- and not just within universities. During the course, I picked up some understanding of the jargon and the research behind it. Like most areas, the was some really good research, and also quite a lot of time wasters writing mundane material - yes, this happens in physics too.

Let's do the same search on the ARC website, but this time for "physics":

"Despite the importance of a weakly interacting Fermi gas to areas as diverse as stellar evolution, conduction in metals, and the nuclear shell model, its realisation has eluded us. With the new cooling techniques developed for the study of Bose-Einstein condensates, its realisation now appears possible. We aim to produce, and study the first dilute, weakly interacting Fermi gas by cooling a cloud of potassium to temperatures less than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero. This step, fascinating in itself, is the first on the path to cooling a dilute Fermi gas to a new superfluid state."

Did you all understand that? If not, should we make Peter Ridd's assumption that the research is not "value for money" because it is "incomprehensible"? The problems posed by academic language, and in particular jargon, are immense when it comes to penetrating other fields of study. However, writing the above abstract in laypersons terms and staying within a reasonable word limit, *and* making it useful to other academics, would also be impossible. I whish there was an easy solution, but as far as I know, there isn't.

Peter says "Perhaps this is done to make the “research” look more impressive." Perhaps Peter thinks that only 'real' research such as physics is allows to have jargon terms.

I'm not so sure Colin, that your defense of Peter is accurate ... he appears to be attacking research in Education, not research and education in physics. Though loosely cloaked, his argument is an attack on another research discipline which Peter can't seem to want to or bother to comprehend. Which sort of leads to Alexm's comment, which I completely agree with - about the exclusive nature of conversations and terms in a lot of academic research - except that I read the ARC grant text again and still found it easy to comprehend if I used my brain a bit. Yes, I had to look up 'post-structural' in the dictionary but all the other key words are common in our language, like reflective, practice, conflicting ideology. And science is no holy cow of communication, it also suffers heavily from exclusionary and down-right boring language. It's all so post-structuralist really ...