Reflection on “Flexner, Accreditation, and Evaluation”

I want to start off by mentioning that evaluations are a little different than research in that they are client driven and often begin with a different frame of reference.  Also, often times, I have heard that evaluations are a study in common sense.

Hang on to these two thoughts as we will revisit them in a little bit.  Additionally, Flexner (1910) mentions common sense as a valid method.  Floden (1980) discusses accreditation as evaluations of a school; where schools refers to “departments, programs or colleges” (p. 35), and other educational institutes.

One of the first concepts to hit me while reading through this article is the idea of weighing internal and external evaluators’ strengths.  Floden mentions the importance of member checking, that there is incredible value at leveraging different perspectives during an educational evaluation. However, Floden brings up a critical question of who guides the evaluation process? Is it the clients? The major stakeholders? All of the participants? Floden (1980) questions the impact of certain groups and asks, “which groups will control the process” (p. 36).

In order to adopt this concept of evaluations in educational context, focused by differing parties we can adopt Flexner’s procedures and educational approaches.  Flexner (1910) has three guiding questions for educational programs, projects, and/or interventions.  The first question is centered around: 1) how should evaluation procedures be determined? Who should be in charge of directing procedures? Is it the evaluators (often experienced in such processes) that should be guiding the evaluation? Or is it the clients (often paying the bill) that should take the lead in the evaluation process? In the end, there needs to be some communication between client, stakeholders and evaluators to come to an agreement on procedures.

The next main question is centered around: 2) who should participate in the evaluation process?  While there is a need to communicate with key stakeholders and include ‘everyone’ in the process, there should be a priority placed on which parties can give the most valuable information (considering resources, as well).  In fact, Flexner (2010) as cited by Floden (1980) mentions that “insider knowledge” is required (p. 39) for successful educational evaluations.  This goes back to the idea of using internal and external evaluators for a well rounded evaluation. The final question adopted from Flexner is the idea of final recommendations and effects: 3) What are the effects of the evaluation?  This includes both the positive and negative impacts of an evaluation.

References:

Flexner, A. (1910). Medical education in the United States and Canada: a report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (No. 4). Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Folden, R. E. (1980). Flexner, accreditation, and evaluation.  Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 2(2), 36-46. Retrieved from  http://www.jstor.org/stable/1163932

Uncertainty Principle, Education (research) Style.

\*\ ^_^  /*/  <– Do a little happy dance!

 

Before I was an educationalist, I was a researcher in the Sciences and we had this idea that whatever we created and “discovered” needed to be revalidated.  Basically when we were expected to publish results any lab should be able to replicate the results.  I grew as an experimentalist, under the guise and care of my faculty.

However, as I shifted gears, my paradigm and perspectives on research design didn’t move as fluidly.  Traditionally I have carried about a more, aligned, constructionist epistemological where I believed that meanings and understanding were influenced by surroundings. In qualitative approaches, in education, this generally means that social phenomena are engineered within social contexts.  And, while these phenomena may seem natural they are, in reality, influenced in design, artifact and constrained by the environment around them.

Think of a cell, yes like the kind in your body.  They change form when influenced by cold temperature or wet environments. Sometimes if you poke at them, they bounce back and sometime your interactions and puncture the fine membrane…and then you can clean up the mess. Researching in educational environments is kind of the same.

As soon as you start watching how someone is interacting with a system, they react to your inspection.  When you attempt to change a participants environment or try interventions, sometime it is merely the presence of the observer that is enough to solicit a reaction.

So then how are we, as research, supposed to create systematic research/date that is replicable?  Honestly, sometimes…most times, I don’t know.  I think the beauty of qualitative methods is that they give space for representing unique contexts as “whole pictures” often expressive from the perspective of the participants. However, often when reading research papers that take a holistic approach I question how the role of the researcher impacts the nature of the study.

This all reminds me of the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle, where you can’t measure both a particle’s position and it’s velocity in the same instance.  The simple act of trying to capture information is disruptive. In fact the more accurately you measure position, the more inaccurately you measure velocity (and vice versa).  The very nature of interventions is disruptive to the natural state of participants, even in educational research.  Some call it observer bias; others call it a threat to internal validity.

While there are methods and designs that can control for such things as the Hawthorne Effect they are more often than not, not incorporated into descriptive qualitative research design.  This measures are not taken because the researcher is meant to be a part of the interpretative instrument (s), but then how does that make this *waves hands around in the air* a) representative, b) accurate, c) maintain naturalistic integrity, and d) replicable?