Research on teaching can be concerned with teaching in general or it can be conducted with a single kind of subject matter. Which kind of research is more advantageous? This issue arises in the planning of programs of research on teaching. The generic approach looks for uniformities, concepts, and principles that apply across all or many subject…

The path to increasing certainty becomes not the single excellent study, which is nonetheless weak in one or more respects, but the convergence of findings from many studies, which are also weak, but in many different ways. The dissimilar or nonreplicated weaknesses leave the replicated finding more secure. (Author/IRT)

Discusses teaching as a scientifically based art, noting that educational research must contribute to social justice, and examines controversy over social science, response to philosophers' criticisms, forms of research, process-product research, illustrative results of process-product research, necessary experiments, and other paradigms for…