However, outside that specific field, I would be pragmatic. The way to assess achievement in a program needs to conform to the way the program being designed, that is, how students are supposed to be trained. If this is a rigorous quantitative training program, then a freestyle narrative novel will not be the best representation of students' understanding of mathematical relationships. I think few people would doubt the wisdom, creativity, and intelligent labor inside a novel, and such forms of intelligence are highly desired. I can understand claims from both sides - that a valid measure should be about what it intends to measure (i.e., what skills the program is training, such as methodologies and evidence-based inquiries), and that a well-established work demonstrates enough epistemic contribution yet skips the logistic procedures. Maybe in the future, there can be substitute formats, but there is also a distinction between the aim of a program and the aim of ultimate education.

-- it is said that research paradigms cannot be simply reconciled by empirical data alone - I agree.

on p.42, this sentence is very interesting: "As Britzman (1995) reminds us, the limit of intelligibility is the boundary ‘where thought stops what it cannot bear to know, what it must shut out to think as it does". At first I think it is a bit too abstract, but relating it to the context, I think I kind of know what it means. The exploration of knowledge inquiry not only challenge what we don't know, but also what we know. In many cases, the findings deviate from what we belive they should be - in many cases, we will just discard that because we don't want to challenge the whole large systems of assumptions. An example would be - recognizing this would challenge my identity as a feminist/religious person /... so I would reject that idea... I am just thinking about that, may not be the truth.

While I am taking in most of the information, I also held a doubt. I think it is not to have a research paradigm first and then do the research, it is that we first have a research question - a specific thing that we want to know about. We care about group differences and want to compare them to the larger population, then we use statistical analyses. We care about a specific community, then we do ethnography. It would not make sense that investigation of 3 people to employ inferential statistics.

I would agree that there are a lot of disadvantages to quantitative research and statistics, however, qualitative research did not solve the inherent "bias" or "position", either. Therefore, the attack that quan methods endured did not make much sense to me. Ultimately, it is what researchers want to investigate. I don't like the behavior attacking other folks' research paradigms.

at hand, and what future is being generated, including what values and judgments researchers themselves perpetuate in

society.

What are the values you carry into your research and work?