The Constructivist Credo

Yvonna S Lincoln, Egon G Guba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315418797
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Constructivist Credo is a set of foundational principles for those wishing to conduct social science research within the constructivist paradigm. They were distilled by Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba from their many writings on this topic and are provided in the form of 150 propositional statements. After Guba's death in 2008, the Credo was completed by Lincoln and is presented here. In addition to the key principles of constructivist thought, the volume also contains an introduction to constructivism, an intellectual biography and complete bibliography of Guba's work, and a case study using constructivism, showing how the paradigm can be applied to a research study.

Egon Guba

Observations on a Journey to Constructivism

Thomas A. Schwandt

Scholar-teachers do not simply know, they profess. Those who are exceptional at professing do more than convey reasoned, coherent, and thoughtful justifications for their ideas. The best professors are characteristically open to revising what they profess and even abandoning once strongly held positions in light of new knowledge gained through practical experience, conversations with colleagues, and in consideration of the scholarly work of others. Egon's intellectual journey was characterized by this combination of traits and dispositions.

In the thirty years that I knew him, first as a student then as a colleague, we had many exchanges in person and via correspondence about our respective views on the methodology and epistemology of qualitative inquiry, the idea of research paradigms, and theories of evaluation. We debated ideas and offered justifications for our positions, yet I never directly inquired how he came to hold the views that he held. To fully explain the genesis or, perhaps better said, the evolution of his commitment to constructivist philosophy remains an unfinished task awaiting the skills of a biographer, which I am not. Yet, my hope is that what follows conveys something of what it was like for Egon to profess. Perhaps by having some sense of his scholarly temperament readers may better appreciate how he came to the intellectual commitments for which he is best known.

Egon was thoroughly prepared as a quantitative methodologist, having completed a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Physics (Valparaiso University 1947); a master's in Statistics and Measurement (University of Kansas, 1950); and a PhD in Statistics (University of Chicago, 1952). After five years as an Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Chicago, Egon held a brief appointment (1957–58) as Associate Professor of Education at the University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri at Kansas City) and then spent eight years at the Ohio State University (1958–66), followed by twenty-three years at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he retired in 1989.

The period from roughly the mid-1950s through the late 1960s was a time of rapid expansion of federal interest and investment in the educational research and development (R&D) enterprise—not simply in terms of new funding for sponsored projects but also in terms of the significant growth of programs for the preparation of educational researchers at the doctoral level. During this time, as Clark Kerr (1963) explains in The Uses of the University, some fifty to one hundred universities sought to position themselves as "Federal Grant Universities"—those who aspired to be among the top recipients of federal research contracts, had developed specialized research institutes, and received 30 or more percent of their income from federal contracts. Although investments in research in the behavioral and natural sciences may have drawn the most attention during this time, similar aspirations to establish the educational research enterprise were quite evident, not least in large major public universities like Ohio State.

Egon's early career unfolded in this heady period of expansion of educational R&D. In the eight years he was on the faculty at Ohio State University he was, successively head of the Division of Educational Research in the Bureau of Educational Research and Service; coordinator of research in the College of Education; and director of the Bureau of Educational Research and Service (while in that role in 1963 he established an evaluation center in the Bureau and hired Daniel Stufflebeam to direct it). When he moved to Indiana University in 1966, Egon continued for several years to serve roles in the R&D enterprise as director of the National Institute for the Study of Educational Change; associate dean for Academic Affairs; and co-director of the Research on Institutions of Teacher Education (RITE) Project.

In the mid- to late-1960s, there was growing optimism among many educational researchers and practitioners that the federal government would be able to fund large efforts aimed at school improvement. There was widespread belief in the idea that innovations could be developed outside of actual educational settings (Research), given trials in certain school sites (Development), and then, eventually, become widely disseminated (Diffusion), resulting in a significant system level change in educational practices (Thomas, 1975).

It was against this backdrop that Egon's work during these years was focused on the development of R, D, & D models for federal policies for educational research that would, in turn, effect significant improvement-oriented change in educational practice. In 1965, along with his colleague David Clark at Indiana University, he published a paper on change process theory that became widely known as the Clark-Guba model for educational research, development, and diffusion that reflected this growing optimism (Clark & Guba, 1965). Ten years later, in response to criticisms surrounding the theoretical and empirical adequacy of that model, they abandoned it and developed the configurational perspective of knowledge production and utilization (Guba & Clark, 1975). This disposition to revise and reconsider earlier views (see also Clark & Guba, 1972)—perhaps first evident in the way in which he and Clark revised their initial R, D, & D model—would come to characterize Egon's continued conceptualizations of evaluation and educational research as his ideas about the methodology of naturalistic inquiry evolved.

It was also in the mid-1960s that the theory and practice of program evaluation in education began to develop as mandates to evaluate were incorporated into federally funded education and social programs. At its outset, experimentalists and psychometricians dominated the field, but a small group of largely educational researchers had begun to question whether these tools alone were the best choice for evaluation.

At this stage of his career, Egon shared his colleagues' optimism in the power of traditional forms of systematic inquiry—the research methodologies of the statistician (experimentation) and the psychometrician (tests and assessments)—to generate useful knowledge for the improvement of educational practice. But there is evidence that by the mid- to late 1960s Egon had begun to question this position.

Dan Stufflebeam (2008, p. 1389) recalls that while Egon was director of the Bureau of Educational Research and Service at Ohio State, "he had a contract to evaluate MPATI (Midwest Program for Airborne Televised Instruction). A DC3 from Purdue University regularly flew around the Midwest during school days while beaming certain courses that a randomly assigned group of selected schools could receive on television sets. Egon's responsibility was to conduct a true experiment through which he would compare student outcomes for schools that got the MPATI courses with a randomly assigned control group of schools that taught the same courses according to past school practices." Although the results of the experiment revealed no statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups, Egon remained committed to the methodology.

In a subsequent research project funded by Encyclopedia Britannica and Bell and Howell, named Project Discovery Egon was asked to evaluate the effects on students, teachers, administrators, parents, and the curricula of placing audiovisual equipment and media in four schools in four different regions of the United States. Egon's initial plan to employ a traditional design was thwarted when the funders required that the evaluation be conducted only in the four schools in question without recourse to a design involving experimental and control groups. Instead, the project involved recruiting four resident field observers to each spend approximately nine months at his or her respective site using largely qualitative methods to document the effects of Project Discovery. Stufflebeam (2008) recalls this as perhaps the first excursion into what Egon at the time called 'aexperimental design.'

Shortly after these projects were completed, Egon delivered several papers based on appraisals of what he had learned. The first, in November 1965, was an address to the Conference on Strategies for Educational Change in Washington, DC, entitled "Methodological Strategies for Educational Change." The abstract for that paper read:

This study of strategies for educational change concludes that the aexperimental, observational, or field study approach is preferred

to the experimental or laboratory approach, both for change research, which is concerned with the entire process of change, and for evaluation, which is concerned with the assessment of single phases of change. Experimental strategy inquires into possibilities, whereas aexperimental strategy inquires into actualities.

Two years later he published a paper entitled "The Expanding Concept of Research" (Cuba, 1967) that further revealed how he had begun to question the utility of then dominant means of systematic inquiry for generating knowledge useful for educational change. He argued that "the concept [emphasis in original] of what research is and how it may be utilized to affect educational practice is under considerable scrutiny" (p. 57) and that three specific areas of concern were emerging:

First, it is clear that the traditional techniques of research are not adequate to handle the many questions that can or should be asked about education. Classic models of experimentation, although extremely useful, cannot handle the full range of inquiry. Second, there is a developing interest in establishing better linkages between research and practice....Finally, there is a shift away from questions of mere technique and methodology in research to those concerning the nature of problems, the place of theory, and other aspects of the research activity, (pp. 57–58)

In this paper, Egon, the experimenter, raised a number of critical questions about the utility of experiments for answering the kinds of questions that were most important for effecting educational change. He did not dismiss the study of educational interventions via experimentation as irrelevant but simply pointed out the limitations of that methodology and noted, drawing on the work of the ecological psychologist Roger Barker, that

there is a second kind of inquiry... in which the investigator does not intervene at all but simply keeps a close record of what occurs. This second mode—which Barker called 'Type T' inquiry and which I call 'aexperimental' inquiry delivers a real-life correspondence not available in the laboratory. On the other hand, the laboratory offers a degree of precision and control that can never be approximated in a field study, (p. 60)

At this point in his career, Egon focused principally on the utility of methodologies for educational research and evaluation. It appears that his interests lay in finding a methodology that would prove useful for promoting educational change in ways that experimentation could not. Egon's concerns were not yet focused on the idea of alternative paradigms, but rather on the value of new ways of studying educational issues and circumstances. As he explained:

Both forms of inquiry provide valuable information. The experimental approach yields information about a total range of relationships, focuses attention on a highly restricted number of variables as indicated by theory, maintains careful controls, and is highly generalizable because, it is by design, quite context free. The aexperimental approach yields information about relationships as they actually occur in nature, focuses attention on many variables at once, provides a certain flexibility for adjusting to situations that the rigid controls of experimentalism make impossible, and yields a rich and detailed supply of information about a particular happening in a particular context. The laboratory tells what happens in the best of all possible worlds, while the aexperiment tells what happens in the worst. Thus, experimentalism and aexperimentalism are complementary—representing two sides of the same coin. There are times when each is appropriate, depending upon the investigator's intent, the degree of pre-existing knowledge about the phenomenon being studied, and the relative degree of control or flexibility that may be desirable. (Guba, 1967, p. 60)

Concerns about adequate research methodologies were only part of what Cuba found relevant to an expanding concept of research. His second concern about research-practice linkages focused on the lack of adequate understanding of what was required to bridge the two. He argued that "the assumption was blithely made that educational research, once published, would by some mysterious process be turned into a practical teaching method or new curriculum" (p. 61) and that what was needed was a focus on the science (even engineering) of 'development' as that was concerned with identifying problems, inventing solutions to those problems, engineering the proposed solutions into practical form, and field testing these packages. He wrote, "Those carrying out these functions may be thought of as educational engineers in a very literal sense. Like the engineers of the hard sciences, they are concerned with utilizing the knowledge produced by the researchers in order to develop practical answers to operating problems" (p. 61).¹

This concern with development research dovetailed with Egon's growing concerns about the failure of educational evaluation. After hiring Stufflebeam at Ohio State University, Egon became committed to Stufflebeam's conception of evaluation as a decision-support tool for program management, and the two published several papers in the late 1960s on the significance of this approach (Stufflebeam, 2008). But by 1967 a variety of new approaches to evaluation were being introduced by Lee Cronbach, Robert Stake, Elliott Eisner, and others; alternative conceptualizations continued to flourish through the mid- to late 1970s in the work of Malcolm Parlett and David Hamilton, Ernest House, Michael Patton, and Michael Scriven. Egon was aware of and a participant in this community of scholars exploring new ways of conceptualizing evaluation. In a paper delivered in 1969 (Guba, 1969) he argued that there were "clinical signs" of evaluation's failure: that the field was characterized by immobilization rather than responsiveness to evaluation opportunities; that the very agencies that mandated evaluation were unable to provide reasonable and understandable guidelines for doing it; that evaluation consultants consistently provided misadvice to clients who sought their aid in designing or carrying out evaluations; and that evaluations consistently failed to provide useful information. Guba further enumerated a series of 'basic lacks' that he believed contributed to this failure: lack of adequate definition of evaluation; lack of evaluation theory; lack of knowledge about the decision process; lack of criteria on which judgments might be based; lack of approaches differentiated by level of complexity of what was being evaluated; lack of mechanisms for organizing, processing, and reporting evaluative information; and lack of trained personnel.

In the mid-1970s based on his re-appraisal of experiences with contract evaluations at the Ohio State University as well as conversations with colleagues Robert Wolf and others when he moved to Indiana University Egon began to consider a new approach to evaluation. He delivered a paper in 1977, "Educational Evaluation: The State of the Art," in which he argued that extant models/approaches to evaluation were inadequate and that a science of evaluation must take into account the social and political contexts that surround evaluation.

His thinking about aexperimental methodology and the shortcomings of then current evaluation approaches was brought together in full expression in the 1978 monograph, "Toward a Methodology of Naturalistic Inquiry in Educational Evaluation." This monograph displays the features of naturalistic inquiry as a form of empirical investigation distinct from experim...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Egon Guba: Observations on a Journey to Constructivism
• The Constructivist Credo
• Appendix A: Missions of a Research University
• References
• About the Authors