Educational research and professional practice, though assuredly capable of providing reciprocal benefits one to the other, have, nevertheless, evolved into decidedly different activities. Increasingly, each has a separate and defensible technical basis. Doctoral programs in education should honor and reflect, not conflate, the differences. The…

In this article, the author argues that there appears to be a thrust, at least from the federal government, to provide a rigid definition of what counts as "science": namely, randomized field trials. Code words for this method pervade the No Child Left Behind Act; the phrase "scientifically based research" occurs more than 100…