Research as pinball

A followup to this post. (Recap: this is an attempt to model and chronicle the research process, from half-baked idea to more polished proposal.)

So I started with some idea about how the proliferation of learning outcomes and rubrics was in the same ballpark as replacing social norms with statutory law. That's my quarter. I put it in and started playing.

So where did the ball go? Well, the rough trajectory is something like this. I started looking at learning outcomes for a variety of courses to better understand them. That was both fascinating and disheartening. Ultimately, it left me wondering whether we have any clear idea of what a learning outcome even is.

So, I thought, wouldn't it be great if there were some group of people who were more or less exclusively focused on conceptual analysis? We could call them, I don't know, philosophers. So that's where I turned. It turns out there was a moment for analytic philosophy of education (some details here.) I turned to my friend Mr. Google and he kindly gave me this edited volume--The Concept of Educaiton, R.S. Peters, ed. published in 1967. So I'm bouncing around in this particular cluster of bumpers. I don't know how many points I'm racking up, but the ball is still in play.

In particular, there is some helpful analysis on what it means to learn something. I don't know that I have anything interesting to say about these analyses, but they seem at least potentially helpful for better understanding what a learning outcome is, and what kind of learning those outcomes tend to measure. They also seem potentially helpful for better understanding the ordinary conception of learning that went unspoken in the dark, dark days of education when we didn't spell out in exquisite detail every student learning outcome for every assignment.

There's a good chance I'll lose this particular ball at some point, or get kicked over to some other area, but this is where I am now.