Many people believe that women tend to talk more than men—with some even suggesting that this difference has a biological basis. One widely cited estimate is that women speak 20,000 words per day on average and men speak only 7,000. This claim seems plausible, but is it true? A group of psychologists led by Matthias Mehl decided to find out. They checked to see if anyone had actually tried to count the daily number of words spoken by women and men. No one had. So these researchers conducted a study in which female and male college students (369 in all) wore audio recorders while they went about their lives. The result? The women spoke an average of 16,215 words per day and the men spoke an average of 15,669—an extremely small difference that could easily be explained by chance. In an article in the journal Science, these researchers summed up their findings as follows: “We therefore conclude, on the basis of available empirical evidence, that the widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded” (Mehl, Vazire, Ramirez-Esparza, Slatcher, & Pennebaker, 2007, p. 82)^[1].

Psychology is usually defined as the scientific study of human behaviour and mental processes, and this example illustrates the features that make it scientific.

In comparison, Education is an applied discipline compared to other academic disciplines. Some critics have gone as far as to define education as a “field” or an “applied subject” (Furlong, 2013). The criticism implies that education research is “weak” or “substandard” in comparison with research in other academic disciplines (Wyse, 2020; Wyse, Selwyn, Smith, and Suther, 2017). However, education involves a myriad of subject areas, some scientific and others not scientific, but all involving people. Therefore, research in education is a social science investigating humans through interrelated units or levels, for example: micro (individual), meso (group), macro (institutional), and mega (community).

According to the American Educational Research Association (AERA),

Education research is the scientific field of study that examines education and learning processes and the human attributes, interactions, organizations, and institutions that shape educational outcomes. Scholarship in the field seeks to describe, understand, and explain how learning takes place throughout a person’s life and how formal and informal contexts of education affect all forms of learning. Education research embraces the full spectrum of rigorous methods appropriate to the questions being asked and also drives the development of new tools and methods.

In this chapter, we look closely at the features, review the goals of education, and address several basic questions that students often have about it. Who conducts research in education? Why? Does scientific research in education tell us anything that common sense does not? Why should I bother to learn the scientific approach—especially if I identify as a teacher or administrator, and not a researcher? These are extremely good questions, and answering them now will provide a solid foundation for learning the rest of the material in your course.