Sunday, October 22, 2006

Rock and a Soft Place

Because it's a stretch for me to think (or write) about anything much other than qualifying exams, I have only the following Urie Bronfenbrenner excerpt to share tonight along with a re-run of an old Scrape:

There exists a second body of scholarly work in which external environmental contexts are described in considerable detail and their impact on the course of development graphically traced. Such investigations are carried our primarily in the field of anthropology and to some extent in social work, social psychiatry, clinical psychology, and sociology. But the descriptive material in these studies is heavily anecdotal and the interpretation of causal influences highly subjective and inferential. Here we encounter what I view as an unfortunate and unnecessary schism in contemporary studies of human development. Especially in recent years, research in this sphere has pursued a divided course, each tangential to genuine scientific progress. To corrupt a modern metaphor, we risk being caught between a rock and a soft place. The rock is rigor, and the soft place relevance. The emphasis on rigor has led to experiments that are elegantly designed but often limited in scope. The limitation derives from the fact that many of these experiments involve situations that are unfamiliar, artificial, and short-lived, and call for unusual behaviors that are difficult to generalize to other settings. From this perspective, it can be said that much of developmental psychology, as it now exists, is the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest periods of time. (18)

How does the exam reading garden grow this October 22? I twiddled with the calculator for a brief minute this morning and figured that I've read 130 of the 170 items on my lists. Some of those reading encounters are from a few months ago. Or more (during coursework). I have what I'd describe as good notes on ~80 of the 130 pieces. I meet with my major exam examiners on Wednesday, and I'm still clinging to the plan of sitting the exams starting Dec. 1. The upcoming five weeks: sort of like entering the fourth quarter of a close contest with no timeouts.

Posted by Derek Mueller at October 22, 2006 11:00 PM to Qualifying Exams