In addition to understanding, prediction, and control, the goal of educational psychology is to influence practice. This requires attention to the fact that people have a preference for stories, meaningful narratives about other people and the problems that they face in every day life. It is argued that the findings and concepts of our discipline are not seen as possessing verisimilitude and rarely influence educational policy and practice because they are not well contextualized for educators. To do better, we must learn to tell stories about our research that focus on real teachers and students in ordinary school setting.

The nature and mission of educational psychology is to provide psychologists, other social scientists, and a broad spectrum of educational policymakers and practitioners with data and concepts to create sensible, persuasive, and powerful stories. It is this emphasis on the importance of stories that differentiates this article from the scores of others that have examined the nature and mission of our field over the century.

 In recent years we have learned, as Calfee in this issue notes, that the mind has a preference for stories. Knowledge is contextualized, it is situated, it is enmeshed in webs of meaning. Educational psychologists have not, as a rule, used that insight to think about how their data and concepts can have the most usefulness. Failure to understand the importance of stories has contributed to our marginality in both psychology and education. We were warned about that problem at the very beginnings of our discipline, but we failed to heed the cautions of one of our founding fathers. In his presidential address before the American Psychological Association, John Dewey (1899) discussed psychology and social practice. He pointed out the failure that had to occur if educational psychology would not recognize that the teacher:

 lives in a social sphere -- he is a member and an organ of a social life. His aims are social aims; ... Whatever he as a teacher effectively does, he does as a person; and he does with and towards persons. His methods, like his aims, . . . are practical, are social, are ethical, are anything you please -- save merely psychical. In comparison with this, the material and the data, the standpoint and the methods of psychology, are abstract. . . . I do not think there is danger of going too far in asserting the social and the teleological nature of the work of the teacher; or in asserting the abstract and partial character of the mechanism into which the psychologist, transmutes the play of vital values. (p. 117)

THE DISCIPLINE OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

A discipline is a field of scholarship held together by a focus on a common set of problems, such as the organism, the cosmos, or the behavior of animals. It is frequently the case that a discipline has particular methods and particular concepts with which its members study and organize the phenomena in which it is interested, but this is not always so. In our own field, the content, boundaries, and methods are always changing, making it a field that is difficult to define and thus, for some, difficult to see as an independent discipline (Mathis, Menges, & McMillan, 1977). Our fellow educational psychologists sometimes have not been able to tell if we are an a theoretical hodgepodge or an applied science (Ausubel, 1968; Fredenburgh, 1968), and they have not always agreed about whether our focus should be in the laboratory or the field, a problem that has plagued us since the founding fathers wrote of our possibilities (Dewey, 1899; Thorndike, 1910). Despite the lack of a consensus, I think we meet all the relevant criteria to be a discipline and need not use sub- or applied distinctions at all when we refer to our field of study. Like Wittrock, in this  issue, I believe that it does not serve our interests to think of ourselves as a branch, applied arm, or subdiscipline of psychology. We meet the qualifications for disciplinary status, and should behave like educational psychologists, not psychologists interested in education. That difference has, I believe, hurt us in the past. To regard education as a site to practice our trade, a curiosity for applying the scientific knowledge of the field, is to miss at least two things: (a) a genuine understanding of the educational enterprise and (b) a chance to profit from the knowledge of practitioners. Taking the educational part of educational psychology seriously means, among other things, both learning the stories practitioners tell about life in schools, and telling stories that might influence their life in schools. If this discipline is to influence education, its members need to listen to and tell authentic educational stories.

A Focus of the Discipline

Our discipline of educational psychology may be defined in a way that meets with little disagreement among its members and that recognizes its school-based nature. For example, following Wittrock (1967), we can state that we study primarily the thoughts and actions of people in educational settings. At the heart of the discipline, though it branches widely, is a focus on the psychological study of the commonplaces of schooling, namely, how someone teaches something to someone else in some context. We study what people think and do as they teach and learn a particular curriculum in a particular environment where education and training are intended to take place. Assessment is an integral part of such scholarship because learning cannot take place except over time, and that means assessing change in some way. Of course we study other phenomena, but the center of the discipline seems to me to be quite clear and quite school oriented.

Methods and Concepts of the Discipline

Some of our methods are created for us and by us, and are of such high quality that they affect all the social sciences: Examples include meta-analysis, from Glass (see Glass, McGaw, & Smith, 1981); the conceptualization of experimental and quasi-experimental work by Campbell and Stanley (1963); or Cronbach's generalizability theory (see Cronbach, Gleser, Nanda, & Rajaratnam, 1972). Some of our methods come from neighboring disciplines in the social or biological sciences. For example, ethnographic and naturalistic methods come primarily from anthropology and other social sciences concerned with ethnomethodology; statistical methods come from within and from agriculture, public health, sociology, economics, and other areas; and methods such as think-aloud protocol analysis and policy-tracing techniques have been borrowed from cognitive science. Many of our concepts are borrowed, but many are either unique or become saturated with special meanings because they are used by educational psychologists in special ways (e.g., time-on-task, buggy algorithms, multiple intelligences, zone of proximal development, accommodation and assimilation, authentic assessment). With our own special phenomena to focus on, our own methods, and our own concepts, as well as our gift of some of these methods and concepts to both the social sciences and the general public, there is no criteria I know of by which we should be denied disciplinary status. But in the academy, a discipline is determined primarily by who got there first. Thus, institutions of higher education recognize psychology and physics as disciplines, whereas women's studies, linguistics, and educational psychology are usually not regarded in that way. Nevertheless, those fields certainly meet the stipulative properties used by disciplines to define themselves, namely, a focus on a particular area, and some common methods and concepts for analyzing and organizing that area.

Lack of Disciplinary Status

Without the status of a discipline the various subdisciplines, programs of study, areas of concentration, or applied fields within a university get marginalized, fighting for resources that go automatically to the well established disciplines. Thus, those calling themselves educational psychologists -- seen as members of a subdiscipline or as applied psychologists, whether housed within a department of psychology or in a school of education -- have fought regularly for what they perceive to be their proper status and appropriate share of the resources available within the academy. They have fought by traditional means, showing how -- like physics, chemistry, or biology -- the knowledge generated in the field of educational psychology gives rise to understanding, allows for prediction, and permits control. This is no mean achievement. But it has not impressed our academic colleagues in psychology and other social sciences, who protect their scarce resources and academic status from any related community of researchers who claim disciplinary status, no matter how much those researchers achieve in terms of insightful scholarship, basic science, or service to humanity. Nor has the productivity in educational psychology resulted in our gaining much respect from the educational community whom we have committed ourselves to study and serve. We are often seen is the difficult people in a school of education, reluctantly servicing a teacher education program and conducting studies of little relevance to hose who must teach and run the nation's schools. I believe our problems with colleagues in both psychology and education rise in part from our conception of what it means to understand, predict, and control phenomena in a field as complex as education, a field of study completely enmeshed in the social structure, politics, and economics of the society in which it takes part. Furthermore, I would argue that educational psychology must add another basic goal to its statement of mission. I believe that in addition to understanding, prediction, and control, we should strive to influence education. If we can achieve more influence on the enormous and costly enterprise of education, we might increase our status, our share of the resources that universities have to offer, and the amount of funding that our discipline receives. At the same time, we might help our nation. All that is more likely to come about if we take responsibility for telling more genuine stories about the work that we do.

Understanding as the Development of Sensible Stories

I have come to believe that understanding in a field as complex as education requires more than a theory, although a good theory may be all that is needed to satisfy the simpler disciplines such as biology or physics. In educational psychology we certainly have complex and highly economic symbolic theories, the match in formal theoretical properties of e = mc² . For example, we have appropriated Lewin's (1946) classic B = f(P, E), Feather's (1982) E(xpectancy) x V(alue) motivational theory, and used extensively Carroll's (1963a) model of school learning, indigenous to our field:

or with all five variables in place,

Carroll's model of school learning is a case study that illustrates the difference between a theory and a story as ways to promote understanding of phenomena. Such differences have the consequence of influencing or not influencing the educational system. For many years that model, though derived from observations about school learning, particularly second language learning, found no storytellers to relate it to the practice of education. Carroll (1985) said it was "just a think piece" and that he was "too much occupied with other matters to try to mount practical experiments with it" (p. 30). Benjamin Bloom (1968), however, seemed less busy with other matters and had full understanding of Morrison's (1926) ideas about how schools might be organized around the concept of mastery. Bloom apparently saw the connection between Morrison and Carroll and was among the first to exploit the Carroll theory for practical purposes. Because he was a university teacher, he saw in this theory the potential to create a story about how school learning can be more humane and productive. His development of mastery learning was the result. I do not believe that the data from mastery studies (e.g., Block & Burns, 1976) were nearly so persuasive as the stories in which the data were embedded (see Slavin, 1987, for a critique of mastery studies). The stories, however, informed us about how all children can learn (Bloom, 1981), and the stories captured our attention when it was told how the well-established relationship between aptitude and achievement could be altered if the schools were to leave the time allocations that they had made for instruction open-ended. The stories were what started people thinking seriously about the prospects of mastery approaches to teaching and learning.

Stories by others who had been influenced by Carroll's theory were also forthcoming. The Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study (BTES), which I directed for many years (Berliner, 1990; Fisher et al., 1980), created data and concepts of some interest to the research community, but it was not merely the empirical findings that influenced educators or educational policy. We think it was the story we created about the academic learning time (ALT) model of instruction that resulted in some policymakers and practitioners taking our data seriously enough to engage in some action. Those stories influenced the government enough to cite the findings in their widely distributed document "What Works" (U.S. Department of Education, 1986). Whenever and wherever we spoke, we created tales that were derived from the Carroll model and our own classroom observations, tales which explored the idea that the single most important variable in education was opportunity to learn, a variable that had associated with it a unique characteristic, namely, that it was in a time metric. We then noted, as well, how it was the genius of Carroll to turn aptitude into a time-based measure, an alterable variable, instead of leaving it as some mysterious genetic or familial variable that was not alterable under ordinary circumstances. The stories we tried to weave about teachers and students in schools were certainly more important than the empirical data we had, though the data and concepts we worked with provided a necessary base for us. We were all well-trained members of the discipline of educational psychology, concerned with the ethics of scientific work, and would certainly not make up our stories out of thin air. We did not, however, believe it was inappropriate to develop our stories out of thin data. We chose to use our data to influence education in ways we believed to be fruitful.

Whatever small successes were achieved from the studies of instructional time were because of the stories we created. We choose to be active in developing such tales, in the hope that we could influence how people understood the ways in which instructional time played an important role in schooling, and we hoped, thereby, to influence educational policy as well. We think that nothing at all would have happened as a result of our multiyear, multimillion dollar study if our theory and data had been presented without an accompanying and authentic story of teaching and learning in which to embed them. Educational psychologists have not, as a rule, learned to provide sensible stories for teachers and policymakers to think about, trust, and act on. I believe we need to do that much more than we have, particularly for the teachers of America. These are primarily practical people, as Dewey warned us, who were not about to interpret the meaning of the BTES regression equations for themselves. But authentic stories of teaching and learning, faithful to the data we collected, did have an impact on that group.

An example of the failure to take stories, meaning-making, context, and the situated nature of cognition seriously has been occurring for 30 years in most basic educational psychology courses. It occurs almost every time Piaget's theory of cognitive development is presented to prospective teachers. Piaget's attempt to understand the growth in complexity of thought led educational psychologists to do studies by the thousands for each other, the archival journals, and the academy, most of which have some scientific value. But for a very long time those same scholars did not do a good job of telling the story of development to the teachers and administrators of our nation's schools. The formal theory of development created by Piaget is very complex, and we often taught it in all its complexity in introductory courses of educational psychology, to insure that teachers and administrators understood what we educational psychologists had taken as lessons learned from the Geneva school. Such actions, I believe, insured our irrelevance to those in the world of educational practice. Educational consultants, including physicists and biologists who were often poorly trained in the discipline of educational psychology and knew nothing about the context of public schooling, some well meaning and some venal, took over the job of creating the stories that teachers and administrators needed to make sense of Piaget's theory. The educational psychology community, by and large, with all its teaching and testing of Piagetian ideas, did little to help practitioners apply Piaget's ideas to issues of schooling, particularly in the areas at the heart of our discipline, learning and instruction. Piaget actually had virtually nothing to say about instruction and little to say about education (Groen, 1978). Nevertheless, Piaget was taught as if it was obvious that such brilliant ideas had to have great utility. In fact, practicing teachers and administrators never needed to understand the formal theory at all. They needed stories of teaching real children that were compatible, not contradictory, with the formal theory, but that primarily illustrated the theory, contextualized it, and gave it meaning, so they could think heuristically as they determined what was appropriate to believe about children in school settings.

There are many examples of understandings that are widely agreed on by educational psychologists but that have been difficult to communicate to teachers and policymakers. We had understood for a long time the pernicious effects of multiple-choice standardized testing. But we did not look much beyond the bubble until some stories became widespread, stories of young kids throwing up, of teachers and principals cheating, and of districts finding ways to emulate Lake Woebegone by insuring that most of their students would score above average. It was the human element in these tales, as much as data about how tests were used, that spurred the present drive for authentic testing.

In still another area, we have a rather fully developed understanding of the negative effects of leaving children back in school, negative effects for the individual child and for society in general. But the practice not only persists, in recent years the practice appears to have increased as the call for "objective standards" by which to judge students and schools has increased. Our hard-won data concerning what happens to most children who are retained in grade appears to be without use. Could it be that some poignant tales are needed to accompany this unusually consistent set of data? Emotional stories of children and their families have finally produced some backlash against school psychologists and special educators who pin labels on children that then cause educational opportunities to be denied. Perhaps more such human tales need to be told to make teachers and policymakers take more seriously the damage they are doing by increasing the rates of retention in grade.

In the study of expectancy effects, a research area thought to be relevant when discussing the detrimental effects that labels can have on children and their families, we have an example of how the story actually got well in front of the data. The experimental evidence for expectancy effects was certainly known before the excitement occasioned by the report of the Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) study. What launched hundreds of studies of this phenomena was certainly not their findings, which had precedents in all the social sciences. Nor was it their data, which on further analysis turned out to be suspect (Elashoff & Snow, 1971). It was the story in which data and findings were intertwined that made the difference. The story caught the attention of liberals, minorities, the press, and a host of educators, all of whom were impressed by the apparent demonstration that a simple social expectancy could be communicated so easily and affect human performance so profoundly. We now know more about the mechanisms affecting this phenomena and its limits (Cooper & Good, 1983; Wineburg, 1987). But a lesson we should have learned from the events that transpired was that stories, even when not true, are extremely persuasive.

Prediction as the Development of Persuasive Stories

It has been argued that understanding by teachers and policymakers of such phenomena as instructional time, Piagetian theory, multiple-choice standardized testing, retention in grade, or expectancy will be enhanced by developing sensible stories. Prediction, another fundamental goal of science, may be viewed as making sensible stories more persuasive. The history of other scientific fields informs us. For example, the theory of the motion of heavenly bodies was considered by most scientists to be sensible, but the prediction that an additional planet would eventually be found to explain the perturbations in the orbit of one of the known planets was much less sensible, and quite daring. Thus when Pluto was found approximately where it was hypothesized to be, the entire theoretical structure for the motion of the planets became still more convincing. When Darwin found an orchid with its stamen embedded 10 in. or more deep in the folds of its petals, he predicted an insect would be found with a beak that measured 10 in. or more, for surely, he reasoned, some animal had to be involved in fertilization through the transfer of pollen. Darwin's hypothesis was ridiculed by entomologists, but some years later xanthopan morgani praedicta was found and it had that most peculiar proboscis (Allan, 1977). Darwin's theory then gained in persuasiveness. Though the common people didn't understand him well, the leading physicists of Einstein's time accepted as sensible his theory that light would bend. But it was over a decade after that prediction was made that equipment could be built to measure that phenomenon during an eclipse. When light bent as predicted, the theory became even more convincing.

Prediction makes our stories more persuasive. Thus, the time variables explored in the BTES could be used to predict achievement and this made our story about instructional time more credible. The variance in achievement that is accounted for by time variables is anywhere from 10% to 50% (Berliner, 1990), depending on the studies from which one draws the estimates. Opportunity to learn, one of the powerful time-based variables with which we worked, proved to be a concept that could also be used to predict national performance on tests given to students in dozens of different countries. Opportunity to learn seemed to be the most parsimonious explanation for performance differences in mathematics and science between our nation and, say, Japan. A set of consistent findings using time variables to predict achievement gave meaning to the stories that were told about the importance of instructional time, increasing their persuasiveness.

Other examples where prediction improves the tale to be told may be found. The story of how beneficial early childhood education can be, particularly in the life of underprivileged youngsters, was sensible and met with acceptance by some taxpayers because of their humanistic and altruistic beliefs. But the data supporting these programs was not strong. Then we began to get the news that such programs predict lower incarceration rates, better school grades and higher levels of school completion, increased employment, and higher taxes paid over a lifetime. These predictions made the stories of success from some early childhood programs more credible, more persuasive, particularly among those who were unpersuaded by the altruistic arguments.

In another area of educational psychology, attempts to describe effective teaching had been going on for decades. But the 1960s and 1970s saw a few dozen correlational studies emerge which permitted the prediction of achievement in ordinary classrooms. The ability to tell a tale about effective teaching and what is needed in teacher education, from the perspective of a direct instructional model, was greatly enhanced. In yet another area, research on class size, most of the work that had been done was correlational. A meta-analysis of those studies predicted effects that validated the testimony of teachers who had taught in both large and small classes. Their stories were provided credibility by the data.

Control as the Development of Powerful Stories

If understanding by teachers and policymakers is enhanced through sensible stories, and prediction makes those stories more persuasive, then control provides such stories with power. It is hard to refute a story when a well-designed causal experiment stands behind it. For example, the institution of cooperative learning activities, from Dewey to contemporary times, was a curriculum goal of many teacher educators. The predicted effects of cooperative and competitive forms of learning had been discussed in the literature, with a particular emphasis on the unfortunate side-effects that sometimes accompanied competitive learning environments. This all lent credence to the stories about student motivation in traditional classrooms,  stories of learned helplessness and the dissipation of achievement motivation. But it was the controlled experimental findings associated with cooperative and competitive learning that permitted more powerful data to be woven into those tales of success and failure in school settings, informing us about the virtues and liabilities of each of these forms of instruction. Cooperative learning, with an underlying educational theory and supporting observational data, did not become popular in the schools until David and Roger Johnson, Robert Slavin, and others, began to do causal studies and then embedded their weak but consistent experimental data in stories with a moral dimension. It is not that cooperative learning has a gigantic advantage over, say, direct instruction, for all purposes and in all settings, when achievement outcomes are used as criteria. In general, when comparisons with traditional instruction are made, the data do not usually show negative effects and often show no difference; but they have rather consistently shown moderate positive effects in well-designed true experiments. With a set of causal, positive effects, and with a method that has a moral claim to make on us, a powerful set of stories about cooperative learning became widespread. They were sensible, persuasive, and quite convincing, because control had been demonstrated.

The practice of tutoring has also been promoted for decades. There are many reasons for believing that cross-age tutoring, for example, is good for both tutor and tutee, and that it is one of the most cost-effective instructional methods we have (Levin, Glass, & Meister, 1984). But this teaching method has not caught on. It has a theoretical and moral underpinning, with correlational and experimental evidence to back it up, and still it fails to be instituted in schools. Why? What mechanisms prevent more widespread use of this well-researched instructional technique? Perhaps tutoring fails to get the attention it deserves, given the consistent data that is associated with it, because the educational psychologists that investigate this method of instruction are counting too much on the data alone. The supporting theory, along with the correlational and experimental data existing in this area, could lead to more persuasive and powerful stories about tutoring in classroom contexts. It is those tales that need telling, and I do not hear them. Authentic tales need to be told about the successful implementation of the complex management structures needed to support tutoring, of the pride felt by the tutors in their accomplishments, of the feelings of closeness that develop between tutor and tutee, and of other human and emotional dimensions associated with this method. These human elements were present when the Johnsons and Slavin disseminated their work, but to my knowledge, are not featured when tutoring methods are disseminated.

I think this same failure to tell sensible, persuasive, and powerful stories of people, their changes, and the human effects of the process, has also kept some of our most powerful contemporary findings away from teachers and out of the schools. For example, reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) has evidenced consistent and large effects in remediating some problems of comprehension that were thought to be intractable (Rosenshine, 1991). But this technique has not often been disseminated in preservice or in-service programs of teacher education and therefore is not used in many schools. We have also the generative theory of Wittrock (1989), backed by data that is persuasive and powerful, but which is not influencing classroom instruction very much. I suspect that is because it has not been embedded in the tales from which people in practice and policy learn. We also have controlled, laboratory studies of the effects of visual conceptual models on learning. These have demonstrated unusually consistent and powerful effects on transfer (Mayer, 1989), but there is no evidence that these conceptual models are used outside the laboratory. These powerful findings do not contribute to school learning, their power stored as potential within the pages of a professional journal, Authentic stories of their utility, developed by and directed to real people in policy and practice, are needed to give this inert kind of propositional knowledge some life.

THE PLACE OF STORIES IN LEARNING AND IN THE COURTS 

There is much in contemporary psychology that supports this emphasis on the importance of stories. In The Call of Stories, Robert Coles (1989) argued that only through narratives can another's life really be comprehended. He makes a persuasive case for why educational psychologists might profit from listening to and telling stories about teaching and learning in schools. Bruner (1985, 1986) made a similar case. He identified storytelling as one of two fundamentally different modes of human thought, standing in contrast to the analytic, linear way of thinking prevalent in logic, mathematics, and the sciences. Logicodeductive or propositional knowledge, on the one hand, and knowledge derived from narrative, on the other hand, constitute different ways of knowing, each with its own operating principles and its own criteria of well-formedness, though neither should be considered inherently "better" than the other. One has formal means to verify truth, the other establishes only verisimilitude; "one seeks explications that are context free and universal, and the other seeks explications that are context sensitive and particular" (Bruner, 1985, p. 97). Educational psychologists often fail to contextualize and particularize their research. But context-free and universal findings, derived from internally and externally valid logicodeductive research, will probably not be attended to unless those findings can be embedded in authentic stories of practice.

The work of the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt (1990), deriving some of their ideas from Whitehead's (1929) discussion of inert knowledge, is compatible with the ideas expressed here. Inert knowledge, said Whitehead, is school knowledge, recalled when people are explicitly asked to do so, but of no particular use in daily life. Everyday life is not filled with propositions of the type that educational psychology and the other sciences are good at deducing; rather, it is comprised of cases, episodes, and emotional relationships, and it is filled with personal meaning. In short, life is lived and recalled in a narrative form, as story, not as propositions. There is even evidence that the brain stores propositions and episodes in different ways (Squire, 1987). The Vanderbilt group, for example, embedded instruction in videodisc adventures, to anchor it, to give it meaning, and with much apparent success. People who acquire their knowledge in context learn that knowledge is a tool, a means to achieve something, not an end in itself -- a point made by Dewey (1933) almost 60 years ago. If what we learn is out of context  -- like so much of mathematics and language as learned in school -- it becomes inert. The whole-language movement in contemporary elementary education appears to be a much-needed reaction to forms of instruction leading to the retention of inert knowledge. I have come to believe that most of what we teach in educational psychology is taught like phonics and vocabulary in reading, or like logarithms and geometry in mathematics; that is, it is taught in a decontextualized manner. Perhaps much of our research lies fallow because we often fail to give it the quality of a tool. We fail to embed it in meaningful contexts; we fail to embed it in stories that teachers and policymakers can use.

We can also learn of the power of stories by studying how research in the domain of educational psychology played a part in Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1954 that overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine of racial discrimination. The data appeared to have dramatically affected the educational policies of this nation. But the data about Black children's self-esteem, racial preferences, school performance, and the differences in school environments that were experienced by Black and White children had been around for dozens of years. Nothing happened, however, until a powerful story, heart-wrenching for many in the country, was woven from the existing data. I believe it was the stories associated with the data, more than the data itself, that led to the decision that began one of the most profound changes in American education in this century. Data alone could not have made the difference:

The impact of social science on educational law . . . is weakened by the fact that one of its principal exports, empirical evidence, simply may not be judged germane to the case. But even when a class of facts is admittedly relevant, the claims of social science may be discounted by the courts because of the state of the art. Ideally a social-scientific proposition introduced into a legal proceeding should be clear, certain, stable, and framed at the appropriate level of abstraction. These desiderata are seldom fully realized. Practitioners of social science have, after all, mastered a demanding craft, sometimes using an arcane technical vocabulary, and employ sophisticated quantitative methods. It is difficult to imagine that these modes of thought are congenial to most courts or, indeed, that jurists always comprehend them. (Bressler & Berke, 1978, p. 608)

The unfortunate if inevitable tendency (in this debate) . . . is to lose sight of the disadvantaged young students on whose behalf the suit was brought in an overgrown garden of numbers and charts and jargon like "standard deviation of the variable, statistically significant Pearson product moment correlations." The reports by the experts . . . are less helpful than they might have been for the simple reason that they do not begin from a common data base, disagree over crucial statistical assumptions, and reach different conclusions. . . . The lawyers in this case had a basic responsibility which they have not completely met to put the hard core statistical demonstrations into language which serious and concerned layman could, with effort, understand.

Goldenberg and Gallimore (1991) have made an important point about the difference between generalizable, propositional knowledge in education, and local knowledge. For policymakers and practitioners, propositional knowledge, that is, research knowledge, has an inert quality -- it cannot be used as is. It does not fit. For school people, propositional knowledge must become meaningful within a complex local culture, in which it is likely to be transformed before it can be owned by the participants, before it can become local knowledge. The data and concepts of educational research in general, and educational psychology in particular, are insufficient for effecting change at the local site. The local culture and its people must be understood, a point made by Dewey (1899), reported at the start of this essay, and echoed in the works of many others, particularly, Sarason (1990) and Geertz (1984).

House (1991) makes the same point in an article on scientific realism. Teachers are intelligent and concerned actors in educational programs, and thus the findings of educational research may not work in the ways intended, as if a drone were to carry out the prescriptions derived from a research study. Questions of internal and external validity, which have been attended to in the past, may now need to be supplemented by questions about:

The validity with which researchers draw conclusions from their studies, the validity with which practitioners draw conclusions from these studies to their own situation, and the validity with which teachers and other practitioners draw conclusions for themselves on the basis of their own experiences (House, Mathison, & McTaggert, 1989). A critical test for realism in research is that it be realistic in practice as well. (p. 9)

The analytic approach affords the testing of theory-based hypotheses, including the possibility of carefully ruling out rival hypotheses. But while it is better suited to study that which can be made to happen, it is not well suited to study that which happens in actuality under normal conditions. (p. 16; see also Scarr, 1985)

The stories we need to tell, to exert more influence, must be entwined with the "stuff" of the sites in which we hope our data and concepts will prove useful. It is by following up our laboratory findings in real-world settings, or by using real-world analogues to illustrate our laboratory findings, that we encourage understanding of what we find, perhaps allowing us to influence the policymakers and teachers in the ways that we had hoped. By testing our ideas in real-world settings we gain the direct experience needed to promote those ideas. It is sad, in a way, that two of the founding fathers of educational psychology fought for our soul, and only one of them won. Dewey, who was concerned about the systemic, the authentic, the ordinary thinking of teachers in schools, lost to Thorndike, the analytic, laboratory-based scientist, concerned with measurement, statistical inference, and the development of propositional knowledge. We have not suffered from Thorndike's win, but because Dewey lost so completely, we have not prospered as well as we might have (Lagermann, 1989). I believe our success would have been greater if we had taken the people in their workplace more seriously. If we intend to influence education by disseminating Piagetian ideas, methods of tutoring or reciprocal teaching, applications derived from the generative theory of learning, or knowledge associated with the use of visual conceptual models of complex processes, then we need to tell more stories about our findings that people in policy and practice will understand. Influencing education -- a mission beyond the traditionally accepted ones of understanding, prediction, and control -- requires the development of stories rooted in real-world settings. Our profession will be enhanced if that is done.

CONCLUSION

We should not lose sight of the children and their teachers that our research is intended to help. Teachers not only have a right to expect us to communicate to them in a user-friendly manner, but in ways that respect the complexity of their lives. To accomplish both those tasks we should take our ideas to school sites and then try to (a) weave sensible, persuasive, and powerful stories, (b) that refer to real humans, in real situations, (c) that evoke emotions and a sense of reality, (d) so that we can influence people in the ways that we want.

To do less seems foolish. We all work so hard in our discipline to eke out dependable knowledge from our data. It has been said that some of us have tortured our data until it yielded, giving us the information that we sought. Should our mission end there, after such laborious work? Are our obligations finished once we have written our report for our colleagues and assured the university promotion, tenure, and merit committees that, like those in physics and chemistry, we generate knowledge? I do not think so. I think we must also seek ways to communicate our information so that it is usable to those whose practice might be affected and comprehensible to those who make policies that affect practice.

If we add influencing education as another of our missions, educational psychologists will have to take responsibility for creating more of the sensible, persuasive, and powerful stories that ordinary people can remember and act on. I do not believe that we can continue to assume that someone else will translate our work and be faithful to our data. We need to spend some time trying to do that ourselves.

To take the goal of influence seriously might mean changing some of the courses that educational psychologists take in graduate school. Doctoral courses on organizational behavior and change, and on educational policy, may become as worthy of consideration as a course on LISREL. And the methods of naturalistic inquiry, a form of inquiry dependent on the telling of a good story, need to be learned along with the traditional quantitative methods. It is the human predilection for stories, as much as anything else, that has made qualitative inquiry so popular in recent years.

It is time to take Dewey's cautions to heart, or "we shall continue to teach educational psychology to teachers with a mixture of pious optimism and subdued embarrassment" (Carroll, 1963b). Educational psychology has an audience beyond our fellow scientists, and to reach that audience we must communicate in the ways they can find useful. Embedding our findings in authentic stories is one such way to influence the policy and practice of education.

We learn from stories. More important, we come to understand -- ourselves, others, and even the subjects we teach and learn. Stories engage us.... Stories can help us to understand by making the abstract concrete and accessible. What is only dimly perceived at the level of principle may become vivid and powerful in the concrete. Further, stories motivate us. Even that which we understand at the abstract level may not move us to action, whereas a story often does. . . . Finally, stories are powerful research tools. They provide us with a picture of real people in real situations, struggling with real problems. They banish the indifference often generated by samples, treatments, and faceless subjects. They invite us to speculate on what might have been changed and with what effect. And, of course, they remind us of our persistent fallibility. Most important, they invite us to remember that we are in the business of teaching, learning, and researching to improve the human condition. Telling and listening to stories can be a powerful sign of regard -- of caring -- for one another. (Noddings & Witherell, 1991, pp. 279-280) 

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