Natural scientists are relaxed about the multiple forms experiment takes in their various fields. Yet in education we have for many years constrained our notion of experiment. This methodological circumscription has been self-imposed on the grounds that experiment of a particular, well-defined form offers the clearest evidence of a link between cause and effect in assessing the impact of interventions. I challenge the legitimacy of this assertion and further argue that the model of intervene-and-experiment is ineffective and misleading. There is currently emerging a large body of findings from such experiment, and evaluations of these—like similar evaluations from a wave of experiments in the 1960s and 1970s across education and the applied social sciences—mainly concur on how disappointing the findings from this kind of work are. I argue that interventions are found to have largely nugatory consequences because the influence of independent variables is routinely overwhelmed by powerful contextual influences. I discuss the significance and nature of these contextual influences and question the legitimacy of the idea that one can test interventions with formal experiment in education. I conclude that the assertion that formal experiment can be fruitfully employed may drive policy in unhelpful directions, as models which may be successful in some circumstances are rejected on the basis of low effectiveness scores, while others in which potential effectiveness is indicated are unproductively imposed where circumstances are unpropitious. I suggest that a more unrestricted interpretation of ‘experiment’ needs to return to education discourse.

中文翻译：

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实验在教育探究中的持续失败，以及它为什么总是失败

自然科学家对他们各个领域的多种形式的实验感到放松。然而，在教育领域，我们多年来一直限制着我们对实验的看法。这种方法上的限制是自我强加的，因为特定的、定义明确的形式的实验提供了最清晰的证据，证明在评估干预措施的影响时因果关系之间存在联系。我质疑这一主张的合法性，并进一步认为干预和实验的模型是无效的和误导性的。目前从此类实验中出现了大量发现，对这些结果的评估——比如 1960 年代和 1970 年代教育和应用社会科学领域的一波实验中的类似评估——主要同意这种研究的结果是多么令人失望。工作是。我认为，干预措施被发现在很大程度上具有否定性的后果，因为自变量的影响通常被强大的背景影响所淹没。我讨论了这些背景影响的重要性和性质，并质疑可以通过教育中的正式实验测试干预措施的想法的合法性。我的结论是，正式实验的断言可以卓有成效地使用可能会推动政策朝着无益的方向发展，因为在某些情况下可能成功的模型会因有效性得分低而被拒绝，而其他表明具有潜在有效性的模型在情况不利时却被徒劳地强加。我建议对“实验”的更不受限制的解释需要回到教育话语中。