This need to ponder research findings is crucial to any mature understanding of the educational research enterprise. It is significant to all types of research, quantitative as well as qualitative. It is integral to consideration and implementation of wise educational policies and practices.
Educational research reports present findings, but these results are specific, for the most part, to the context from which the data were obtained. Moreover, many research reports contain a serious flaw: an inadequate discussion of the findings. The Discussion commonly is the final section of the research report and, possibly, the last portion to be written. In this section, the researcher should spin out reasonable interpretations of the obtained results, but too many of these sections are anemic or feeble. Several explanations for this profound flaw appear to be reasonable, although each probably is overly simplistic.
For example, the researcher, in the understandable desire to complete the report, may hurry the writing of that final Discussion section. After all, the researcher probably has been laboring on the project for months, perhaps longer, and wants to launch a new inquiry, to follow up fresh leads. Another possibility is that the researcher may use the Discussion section either to advocate the ideology that guided the research or the practice or procedure that was the focus of the research. In this situation, the Discussion section restricts possible meanings to ones consistent with the advocacy. Another possibility seems all too real. Most formal preparation for conducting research stresses the importance of conceptualization, of strict adherence to methodology and its assumptions, and to technical analytic procedures. Attention to such major concerns reasonably may shortchange necessary emphasis on adequate reportage of the research study. Especially, the construction of multiple rather than singular explanations, of complex rather than simplistic meanings of obtained results can be an important casualty of time and course organization. Then, too, the researcher may believe, however inappropriately, that any rigorous explication of possible meanings may serve to discredit the reported research study. Carefully conducted inquiries should yield both informative results as well as tough-minded, realistic interpretations that can prompt subsequent thought and research. Whatever the possible explanations, most research studies appear to suffer deficiencies of discussion. Simply, most offer too few possible meanings for readers, practitioners, and researchers to begin to ponder.
Still, however culpable, research reporting cannot bear the entire burden of the need for readers to ponder the results. Readers, even if all research reports contained robust discussions, remain responsible for their personal development or elaboration of meanings of the reported results.
Educational practitioners—administrative leaders, teachers, consultants—certainly must recognize that the Discussion in most research reports cannot be translated immediately into action memoranda for planning and implementation. They must think for themselves about the results. They must read the studies, particularly their Discussions, and ponder the suggested meanings for themselves. For example, how do meanings of the reported results appear to inform understandings of student work, teaching practices in our school, our district? How similar are teachers, students, circumstances in our high school or our algebra classes to those reported in the research study?
To ponder is to wring meanings from the particular words of the research report. To ponder is to question relationships of the results to findings of related studies, to wonder about details of reported practices and situations and about nuances of the rhetoric of the findings, and to imagine the consequences of a similar investigation in a particular school, a set of classrooms, or a district. To ponder meanings, of course, is not to substitute thought for action. Responsibly, the process of pondering meanings is prerequisite to the launch of action initiatives and, to be sure, often accompanies those actions. To ponder research results and to search for additional meanings is to honor research and to advance mindful educational practice.