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EDITORIAL
Research with human participants
Kenneth Tobin
Received: 19 September 2007 / Accepted: 19 September 2007 / Published online: 20 October 2007� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Without a moment of thought I popped the small pill into my mouth and contemplated a
bowl of yoghurt. Based on advice from my doctor, my breakfast has a routine that includes
taking an aspirin a day. Today I am curious: Is this practice of regularly taking aspirin
harmful to me? Extensive information on aspirin is available through the Internet, the
popular media, and professional books and magazines. Using online resources I quickly
ascertain that the history of using aspirin as a powder extracted from willow bark dates
back to Hippocrates, synthesis of aspirin happened in the nineteenth century, and mar-
keting occurred throughout the twentieth century. Although the research is clear that in the
population at large benefits of aspirin outweigh harms, for some individuals harms might
outweigh benefits. Even so, aspirin is considered a safe drug, can be purchased at general
stores without a prescription, and instructions on the label are considered adequate to
safeguard against misuse. Charles Campbell noted: ‘‘While aspirin is an effective drug for
the prevention of clots, the downside of aspirin therapy is an increased tendency for
bleeding, particularly from the gastrointestinal tract’’ (Hitti 2007, } 9). I knew vaguely
about side effects of taking aspirin but I had never discussed them with my doctors in a
decade in which I consumed the drug based on their recommendations. I trusted their
professionalism and assumed they were up with the latest research, knew my medical
history, and recommended accordingly. While research on benefits and side effects is
ongoing, the public continues to use aspirin based on doctors’ recommendations and
consumers’ preferences. Aspirin is just one example of a pervasive practice; drugs are
approved for use with and without prescriptions, while research on their efficacy and safety
for humans is ongoing. Within society there is acceptance of the practice of taking med-
ications prescribed by professionals even though there are risks. The assumption is that the
benefits outweigh possible harms.
The above narrative about medical research, practice, and health has striking parallels
with education, including relationships between classroom practices and research, and the
ways in which benefits and harms are weighed in approving educational research with
K. Tobin (&)Urban Education Program, The Graduate Center of City, University of New York,New York, NY 10016-4309, USAe-mail: [email protected]
123
Cult Stud of Sci Educ (2007) 2:703–710DOI 10.1007/s11422-007-9073-x
human participants while at the same time what is learned from educational research is
applied in practice. As is customary in biomedical sciences, application of knowledge from
research can occur at the same time that the efficacy of ‘‘validated practices’’ is researched.
In an educational context the decision to ‘‘prescribe’’ what is learned from research can be
made by a teacher who is teaching at the site of enactment. Researching efficacy of existing
practices usually requires formal peer review.
To an increasing extent in the United States, proposals to do educational research with
human subjects are reviewed using criteria established in the Belmont Report (1979). As
occurs in biomedical sciences, requests for approval to conduct educational research from
an Institutional Review Board (IRB) should address issues of autonomy, beneficence, and
justice. The concern is ethical treatment of human subjects, beginning with who will be
involved and how they will be recruited and selected, fully advising potential participants
about what involvement entails, explaining purposes of the research, and assuring potential
participants they do not have to participate and, if they do, that they can withdraw at any
time without incurring disadvantage. Being involved in research should not disadvantage
participants appreciably and an analysis of the relative weight of benefits and harms should
be provided for the review of an IRB panel and potential participants. An IRB application
should include a plan to provide equal chances for participation of those who are qualified
to be involved and a description of how confidentiality and anonymity can protect the
interests of participants. Descriptions of the data resources are provided and it is specified
whether data are collected only for research or if they arise during normal classroom
conduct and are analyzed for research purposes.
Educational research and practice
Because I do educational research, advise doctoral students, and serve on my university’s
IRB, I participate frequently in discussions on ethics of research with human subjects. In
this section I address four examples of participatory research that are prevalent in science
education and present significant challenges for researchers seeking approval from IRB
panels. For the following examples I present implications for conducting ethical research
with human subjects: cogenerative dialogues, involving teachers and students as
researchers in their own classes, and using digital technologies in school-based research.
Using cogenerative dialogues
There is a great deal of research spanning grades elementary through college to support
using cogenerative dialogues in educational settings. Since 1998, when Wolff-Michael
Roth and I adapted cogenerative dialogues for use in science education, numerous peer
reviewed books and articles address the benefits from research conducted in the United
States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and Taiwan (Tobin and
Roth 2006). Also, about 15 doctoral studies on cogenerative dialogues have been com-
pleted and others are in progress.
The benefits of cogenerative dialogues pertain to institutions, classes, and individual
participants, including students, teachers and administrators. Institutionally, students par-
ticipating in cogenerative dialogues initiated overtures with administrators and counselors,
making suggestions for changes of a school wide nature. For example, students planned,
pilot tested, and enacted cross-grade tutoring programs and used cogenerative dialogues to
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identify and address persistent problems (Bayne 2007). Students accepting responsibility
for collective improvements produced innovative projects. There were impressive benefits
for teachers too. Teachers struggling to control students learned to teach in culturally
adaptive ways and build curricula around students’ cultural capital. Notably, teachers
showed students that they are willing to listen to them, adjust what happens in class, and do
what it takes to improve learning. Students also learned to speak respectfully to their
teacher, listen attentively, and change their roles in class. Key benefits for students include
changes in identity and acceptance of a wider set of roles including coteaching with other
students and the teacher, tutoring peers, and accepting responsibility not only for the
quality of learning in the classroom but also for the quality of teaching.
I performed an Internet search using the term cogenerative dialogues and obtained
approximately 675 hits. Browsing through these resources suggests that research on co-
generative dialogues is regarded as tried and tested, having widespread benefits and
negligible harms. Based on the evidence, it is reasonable for teachers to use cogenerative
dialogues in science classes and throughout their schools. Even though the harms of doing
and not doing educational research need to be considered, there is no comparison in the
potential for harm arising from participation in cogenerative dialogues compared to taking
one baby aspirin a day. Whereas no reported harmful effects are attributed to using co-
generative dialogues, deleterious side effects occur with an incidence of about one in eight
hundred cases of taking aspirin and over-doses can be lethal. According to the Belmont
Report (1979), if an activity, such as cogenerative dialogues, is ‘‘designed solely to
enhance the well-being of an individual patient or client and ... [has] a reasonable
expectation of success’’ the IRB need not adjudicate on its use. Making a decision on
whether or not to enact cogenerative dialogues concerns issues such as whether there is
sufficient time to plan and schedule them. These are not IRB concerns. Professional
educators within a school rightfully have the autonomy to decide whether, when, and how
to arrange students in classes and structure time within the school day.
A professional educator can justify using cogenerative dialogues based on the weight of
research published in peer reviewed sources and enact them as part of normal classroom
practice. Decisions to enact cogenerative dialogues and necessary permissions to do so can
be obtained from school and local educational institutions in ways that cohere with
requirements for gaining approval of children and parents for such activities as videotaping
in the classroom and meeting after school. If parental, school, and district permissions are
required and have been obtained for cogenerative dialogues to be part of normal educa-
tional practice, then whether and how cogenerative dialogues are used is beyond the scope
of an IRB.
If a teacher enacts cogenerative dialogue and decides to undertake research to learn
more about how to tailor enactment to his or her class, approval to do research with human
participants is required. The Belmont report addresses this scenario with the statement that:
‘‘Research and practice may be carried on together when research is designed to evaluate
the safety and efficacy of a therapy.’’ Hence cogenerative dialogues can be used as a
validated practice while efficacy is researched. It may not be the collection of the data, but
its use for research that needs IRB approval, and participants in the research should be fully
informed of the intention to use the data for research purposes.
This section has explored a scenario in educational research that parallels the interre-
lationships between health, medical research, and the professional practices of medical
personnel. Based on relatively recent research on cogenerative dialogues I argue that
teachers can exercise professional judgments to decide whether or not cogenerative dia-
logues are enacted as normal educational practice. In the following section I address an
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example of research that is much older and orders of magnitude more voluminous than
research on cogenerative dialogues. Teachers being researchers belongs to a genre of
participatory research, sometimes described as action research, which is favored by many
as a means to produce more democratic forms of teaching and learning. Also, teachers
researching their own practices, alone or with other researchers, can overcome question-
able ethics of judging others’ professional practices.
Teachers researching their own practices
The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as research for
social management or social engineering. It is a type of action-research, a compar-
ative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and
research leading to social action. (Lewin 1946, p. 35)
According to Hopkins (2002) teacher research is ‘‘research in which teachers look criti-
cally at their own classrooms, primarily for the purpose of improving their teaching and the
quality of education in their schools’’ (p. 7). Some of the advocates for teachers researching
their own practices include Eleanor Duckworth (1987), who regards teaching as research,
arguing that research and teaching both seek to understand learning through observation
and inquiry with a goal of clarifying and uncovering assumptions about teaching. The
teacher as researcher movement has gained considerable momentum in the past two
decades (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 1999) but is historically grounded as far back as the late
sixteenth century with a lineage that includes Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Herbart,
Montessori, and Dewey (Crawford and Cornett 2000). Most often, the history of teacher
research is grounded in action research, recommended for trying out social theory in
practice (Lewin 1946). Lewin regarded a fundamental problem in action research as ‘‘how
to change group conduct so that it would not slide back to the old level within a short time’’
(Lewin 1958, p. 197).
Due mainly to the dominance of positivism in the United States, Lewin’s action
research did not gain traction. However, in Britain, scholars like Lawrence Stenhouse, who
was concerned with negative impacts of positivism on enacted curricula, proposed teacher
researchers as a means of identifying and thereby minimizing potentially oppressive
teaching practices (Stenhouse 1975). From Stenhouse’s perspective, teacher researchers
allow for democratic education by identifying sources of oppression that are overcome
through reflection on students’ work and unintended forms of practice. Teachers study their
relationships with students to ensure they do not exert unreasonable power over them and,
in so doing, engage in meaningful professional development situated in their own practice.
Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) noted that teacher researchers are frequently included in
school reform projects at national, state and local levels as well as in individual schools
where classrooms are considered sites for inquiry. By engaging in research on their own
practices teachers become aware of methods that need to change and identify possibilities
for improving teaching and learning.
It seems ironical that some IRB panels regard teacher researchers as coercive, arguing
that research should be done in someone else’s class–raising the specter of research onteachers. Stenhouse (1975) is clear on the desirability of teachers studying their own
classes:
706 K. Tobin
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The ideal is that the curricular specification should feed a teacher’s personal research
and development programme through which he is progressively increasing his
understanding of his own work and hence bettering his teaching. ... It is not enough
that teacher’s work should be studied: they need to study it themselves. (p. 143)
A rationale for supporting ‘‘outsiders’’ doing research on others’ teaching is often grounded
in neo-positivism (Kincheloe 2003), with an implicit assumption that objectivity is possible
only when others do research on teaching and that subjectivity is a fatal flaw of teachers
doing auto/ethnography. Serious contradictions that IRB panelists often fail to address
about their own practices include assumptions about teacher researchers having access to
data that might hypothetically disadvantage students. The IRB panelists may focus on
possible detriments without considering more plausible possibilities, that teachers having
access to such data will greatly benefit students. A case in point is information obtained
from microanalyses of interactions between students. In an ideal world teachers would
routinely obtain micro-level data on interactions involving all students–using the infor-
mation diagnostically to identify what the student can do, what opportunities seem to be
missed, and when they exist, how inequities arise and are dealt with. Information of this
sort allows teachers to critically review what happens in their classes and plan for cul-
turally adaptive teaching (Tobin 2006).
If there was sufficient time available to study their own teaching, what teachers request
permission to do as teacher researchers might be expected of them as professionals par-
ticipating in school-based professional development (Duckworth 1987). What teacher
researchers do as teacher researchers is consistent with critical pedagogy, in which teachers
actively collaborate with students and other stakeholders, such as parents, fellow teachers,
and school administrators to identify inequities and reasons for them (Kincheloe 2003).
These become thought objects, which can be foci for critical reflection and, in an endeavor
to make schooling more equitable, changes can be planned and enacted. In this way
teachers doing research in their classes, and actively involving students in activities such as
cogenerative dialogues, reduce coercion and disadvantage to participants. Hence, critical
pedagogy can make a positive difference to classes, especially when the teacher and
students collaborate to improve teaching and learning. I have not read of any instance in
which critical pedagogy caused more harms than benefits.
In my research in New York City I involve teachers as researchers to afford their
autonomy for what happens at their sites, avoid ethical concerns about doing research on
others’ practices, and learn from multiple ontologies. Currently, teacher researchers are
principal investigators at their own schools and involve others in their research with the
goal of improving learning. Teacher researchers and others with whom they do research
decide on all aspects of research design. The primary goal is to improve learning in the
school and, through research, make positive contributions to their students and commu-
nities. To ensure that their studies are informed by what is done and learned at other
research sites in the same and other schools, teacher researchers regularly meet together
and with me.
Students as Researchers
In the early 1990s I used student researchers in a study with Stephen Ritchie and Karl
Hook, a teacher researcher in a middle school (Ritchie et al. 1997). At the time, we did not
know enough about collaborating with youth as researchers to attain our goals of doing
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better research and expanding the student researchers’ learning opportunities. It took about
a decade to figure out how to work with students such that they shed their student roles and
adopted legitimate roles as researchers (Elmesky and Tobin 2005). The development of
cogenerative dialogues was a giant step forward in this regard as we learned to listen and
learn from students while expecting they would listen and learn from other participants.
Once we realized that students could understand and use new theories and methods we
made significant progress in creating research designs in which their voices informed what
was studied, how we studied it, and what we learned.
The roles that students undertake in a class are for teachers, students and school-based
educators to decide—not IRB panels. As in the previous examples, IRB approval is needed
to undertake the research on efficacy, not to enact different roles, which is a professional
decision. If the professional judgment is that particular roles will improve learning then it
is for teachers, administrators and school districts to ensure that what is proposed conforms
to regulations and practices of informing and/or obtaining permission from parents and
potential participants. If the expanded roles of students are judged by teaching profes-
sionals to be appropriate for a class then research can be proposed to study the efficacy of
the changes with a view to fine tuning them to enhance their effectiveness.
Using digital technologies
As for the earlier examples, whether to use videotape as a tool for curricular improvement
is a professional decision that is well justified in peer reviewed literature. For example,
involving teachers and students in video analyses is potentially emancipatory and what is
learned can be used as a basis for dialogue about the quality of interactions and transactions
and possible ways of increasing levels of success. Not only do students learn more about
teaching and learning but also they expand their horizons of possibility and potential
identities to include doing research and striving for employment involving digital tech-
nologies. Obtaining IRB permission to use videotape in a classroom is not necessary if a
teacher already has made the professional decision to videotape and analyze data for
professional purposes, in which case videotaping is considered part of usual classroom
practice. Using video data for research, however, is a concern of the IRB and a proposal to
them would focus on obtaining permission to use the data resources in research.
Often it is required that video and audiotapes are destroyed when a study is completed
rather than including them in a digital database where they could be used to test hypotheses
about teaching and learning. With the advent of external hard drives and compression tools
it is now feasible to store large quantities of video and audio files and these can then be
used in longitudinal studies involving micro analysis and video ethnography. Scholars like
Wolff-Michael Roth have pioneered the use of digital databases containing video files and
it is clear they are a rich resource for addressing important research priorities. Given the
enormous costs of collecting video data and the small fraction of the tape that gets ana-
lyzed, it seems like common sense to create suitable protocols to obtain the necessary
approvals to create digital databases that could be used in educational research.
Beyond gatekeeper roles
There are many indicators that education is falling short of its potential to create new
horizons of opportunity in the social world. Problems are pervasive and seem to persist
708 K. Tobin
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across decades. There are dire needs for research that catalyzes improvements in the
institutions involved in the research. Just as society protects itself from undue risks in
medical research and practice it is appropriate that peers review proposed educational
research to ensure that benefits exceed harms for participants. It is not sufficient to argue
that what is learned from educational research can be generalized in some way to a
population consisting of people like those involved in a study. Arguments about benefits
and harms should address participants in the research and whether anticipated harms are
greater than those experienced in day-to-day life in the research sites.
Worrying signs
In my past 20 years of experience with IRB panels there are worrying trends. The IRB
represents the university community and frequently makes sense of research in the social
sciences through lenses that Joe Kincheloe (2003) describes as neo-positivist. There is a
tendency to expect research to adhere to the scientific method simplified as questions,
methods, hypotheses, and likely outcomes. The approach adopts objectivism as a referent,
assuming researchers are independent from the researched. Also there is an expectation
that generalizability will occur, as conceived of in statistical research, producing more
benefits than harms in a population from which a research sample was drawn. Other genres
of research do not fit well with this model of research and its assumptions. Accordingly, to
gain IRB approval to do research, accommodations have to be made to align with an
incommensurable framework and its associated methods. The result is distortion and, in
some cases, deception to get through the IRB, which is regarded as a hurdle. This should
not happen and researchers should make a stand to create structures that afford all genres of
research making an authentic case for ethical conduct with human subjects. IRB panels
should embrace multiple methods and there should be no felt need for researchers to
accommodate to incommensurable epistemological, ontological, and axiological
structures.
Preferred roles
An IRB panel is an affordance to ensure that ethical practices with human subjects are used
in the conduct of research. I regard it as undesirable for panels to insist on design changes
that push researchers away from activist genres of research, away from interpretive
research and ethnography, away from organic and emergent designs, and toward genres of
research that conform with objectivism and the scientific method. Frequently researchers
are prevented from starting a study until they produce a written proposal that conforms to
the expectations of a panel or a subset of it. Some researchers are prevented from doing
what they regard as high priority research. In many of these examples I am concerned with
the ethics of the IRB in adopting a gatekeeper role and I question whether ‘‘peer’’ review is
actually taking place. How are panel members selected such that they are indeed peers with
respect to the proposals they review?
Perhaps science educators can lead a charge for a new set of procedures to operate in the
review of proposals to do research with human subjects. It is important for scholars to
adopt a proactive stance to critically examine criteria the IRB uses for reviewing proposals
and the structures it uses for requesting information from researchers. Taking a proactive
stance seems prudent and the optimal time for researchers to critically review IRB
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structures is not when they have personal stakes. Can the process be more dialogic?
Recently I have experienced universities where the IRB panels examine proposals and
suggest changes to afford approval. There is no back and forth or a sense of playing
gottcha. Instead a four-step process is the norm—submit, specify recommended changes,
revise, and approve. Here the focus is on approving protocols that will be conducted in
ethically sound ways.
An issue that is not often discussed is the ethics of an IRB panel failing to approve, or
delaying approval of, a proposal that will likely produce benefits for teachers and learners.
For example, I have experienced numerous instances of research involving the four
examples I describe in this editorial being denied until such time as the design no longer
involves those being studied as researchers and does not use electronic recording of
classroom processes. However, given what we know about involving teachers and students
as researchers, and utilizing the latest technology in school-based research, the harm done
in disapproving a study might exceed by far negligible harms inflicted on participants
during a study. IRB panels concerned with education might consider the ethics of denial
and discouraging research that has a high priority in educational systems that are failing the
public they are designed to serve.
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