Educational Research as a Reflexive Science of Constitution

Debate over which questions to ask about educational issues and how to answer them might seem a generally technical discussion, very distant from ethical matters and hardly an occasion for accusations of ideologi-cal bias. We know, however, that this has not been the case and that among educational researchers, the debate has often been polemical and contentious. Not only that, during the past decade, it has become politi-cized in new and far-reaching ways, with government agencies dictating what can be considered scientific evidence—namely, findings from ran-domized clinical trials. The reader may be forgiven, then, for wondering why in this chapter I will invite them once more into these murky and turbulent waters. I do so because today we are in a much stronger position than at any time in the past to articulate the logic of a program of research that explores a more fundamental level of educational phenomena than can be studied using clinical trials. Important theoretical and empirical work across th