Pondering stats…

This social context class is dealing with some interesting facts and figures right now: the rate of new teachers who drop out of the profession, the percentages which are happy, the percentages which find their job rewarding etc. I don’t have too much background into sociological/psychological research however, I do know what looks like good research. The problem with doing such subjective types of research is that the language gets in the way of what you really want to ask. There is absolutely no way that a researcher can ever word a question such as “what are the most rewarding experiences in your work” without including some kind of bias into the question. People will find what they are looking for. It’s cool that most of the researches out there in the field of education like teaching, and are positive about teaching, but how can good empirical, statistically crunchable numbers ever come out of researchers that have a strong bias toward the ‘good side’? I suppose the best researcher is someone who really does not care about education and teaching at all. But such a person does not exist since the person would have to have been taught how to do research. .. Humm, maybe this is not perfect, but there’s got to be some better way of approaching this whole thing… I’ll write it in my Blog when I think of it… lol

Q