THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 



By PROF. W. C. BAGLEY, DIRECTOR OF SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF 



ILLINOIS 



The need for definite educational standards has been keenly 

 felt for some time. Until the school can measure in an effective 

 way the actual results of its work, — until it can determine with 

 some measure of precision how its processes work out in the 

 lives of its pupils, — the work of teaching will not be able to com- 

 mand the rewards that everyone is willing to admit it deserves 

 Education of one sort or another is responsible for certain 

 important differences in human beings. But precisely what 

 these differences are and how they are to be measured and what 

 teacher or what school or what books are responsible for 

 them, — these are questions for which, at the present time, no sat- 

 isfactory answer is forthcoming. Dogma and opinion are always 

 ready with hypotheses, but for every opinion that is ventured, 

 another equally convincing and of quite the opposite trend, can 

 be advanced. If one asserts that over one-half of the men and 

 women listed in "Who's Who in America" are college-bred, 

 and concludes therefrom that college training increases one's 

 chances for preeminence, the skeptic is always ready with the 

 opinion that the colleges select the l)est material, and that the 

 preeminence is consequently due to native gifts and not to 

 college training. If one maintains that the discipline of the nat- 

 ural sciences furnishes a protective armor against fraud and 

 deception, the same skeptic may very quickly present a long 

 list of eminent scientists who have been shamelessly hood- 

 winked by clairvoyants, spiritualistic mediums, and other "psy- 

 cho-fakers" — from whom, by the way, the general public stands 

 in far greater need of protection than from the much-abused 

 "nature-fakers". 



The advocates of every subject now taught in the schools 

 or clamoring for a place in the curriculum has each his own im- 

 posing array of "reasons" which justify the employment of 

 schooltime and the expenditure of public money in the "teach- 

 ing" of the subject. And yet, when these reasons are analyzed, 

 they are found to be based practically without exception upon 

 vvhat is "supposed" to to be the outcome. That this outcome 

 is even tolerably certain we have, in the majority of cases, ab- 

 solutely no evidence. This does not mean, of course, that the 

 teaching of these subjects is necessarily inadeciuatc, nor that 



