This publication looks at the evolution of educational research as the end of the 20th century nears. Focusing on research carried out in Switzerland, the paper questions the significance of the research, its methods, and the impact it has had on Swiss education. For 50 years educational research has taken many forms from experimental pedagogy to sociology of education, passing through institutional pedagogy or action research. The paper questions the impact of educational research and asks why educational systems, contrary to all domains of economic and social life, are so reticent to take into consideration products of a scientific approach to educational phenomena. The future of educational research will probably enter into a better understanding of complexity of these phenomena into the elaboration of coherent and structured research programmers and into the survey of changing paradigms induced by new technologies of communication. (Author/RH)