So in an effort to get back into the habit of blogging more (which I have clearly been failing at), I’ve decided to reinstate the 50 Modern Thinkers series, or at least throw a few in now and then. These help me in that the book offers lovely, discrete (-ish) little nuggets of information, then I tell you what I think about them. Sometimes that seems a lot easier to me than organizing my thoughts about some abstract concept (like “education,” or “science”). I know I also need to do more of that really challenging thinking, but in the meantime, I figure reading about other people’s thoughts might do me some good…and keep me blogging!

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Over the span of his career, Donald Campbell contributed to many fields, including social psychology and experimental methods, for which he is best known. Among other things, he often spoke out about the over-confidence and elitism of those in academia, and particularly those in the sciences.  He held strongly to the belief that scientists shouldn’t be proclaiming universal truths, but conservatively suggesting possible explanations for a particular data set. There’s a great quote in his profile about what happens when you get over-confident scientists and over-zealous politicians on the same side of an issue:

Government asks what to do, and scholars answer with assurance, quite out of keeping with the scientific status of their fields. In the process, the scholar-advisors too (along with the politicians), fall into the over-advocacy trap. Certainly the idea that one already knows precludes finding out how valid one’s theories are.

He was often critical of his own field of social science, feeling that more often than not, social scientists set out to validate their own theories, rather than let the data guide them to new theories that might be socially useful. In one of his attempts to follow his own advice, he set out to conduct a study on prejudice and social attitudes (in the 1960’s). With his usual precision, he set out with a great team of statisticians and research associates, and this is what he said about the experience:

We were a high morale team, working on the best integration of theory and data collection I have ever achieved, with an extreme enough sample size to be definitive.

The results were crushingly negative and threw me, at least, into a temporary depression. Our research write-up began ‘This thorough, tedious, expensive, and disappointing study…

Despite feeling pretty bad for the guy, I was actually comforted to know that “grown up” scientists feel this way too. There’s just nothing worse than putting everything into a project only to get nothing out of it. Apparently Campbell had quite a few periods of depression throughout his career, particularly at times when he couldn’t keep up with all his commitments (of which there were many), but he was able to maintain an overall optimistic outlook.

He also felt strongly about the role of government in education, saying tests “that have been valid for describing the state of society become invalid when they start being used for political decision making…Thus, achievement tests once valid for describing educational status have become less valid when used as the basis of rewards to students or teachers.” This is certainly a hot topic in education today, and from what I’ve gathered from almost everyone I’ve spoken with about it is that standardized/state required testing is (one of the things) killing the public school system in the US. I would certainly say that’s the case, but don’t listen to me – you’re much better off taking Campbell’s word for it.