Carol A. Gordon, Ed.D.

My research is rooted in cognitive science and information science, including user-centric information theory, learning theory, cognitive psychology, and constructivism.  At the heart of the research is the investigation of adolescent searching behavior and instructional interventions.  These investigations seek ways to connect rigorous academic inquiry with knowledge acquisition and information competencies, particularly in the context of Professor Carol Kuhlthau's Information Search Process.  The research focuses on the teaching and learning of information and research skills and the effectiveness of applied methodologies.  An epistemological approach considers the infrastructure of academic disciplines, the questions that drive inquiry in the disciplines, and the methodologies of these inquiries, as essential to building knowledge through competencies in information use, application, and evaluation.  Teaching and learning are seen as inter-related and synergistic strands of an interactive process.  Guided by a three-dimensional model of authentic teaching, my research has evolved to target and test evidence-based practices, such as authentic learning tasks and assessments, authentic student research, and action research, and to find relationships and connections between effective teaching and learning through reflective practice.

Another dimension of my research views instruction as the organizing principle for the management of school libraries, and includes strategic planning and effective measures for the improvement of performance and program evaluation.

Another research direction concerns methodologies that originated in my doctoral dissertation: applying the Theory of Expected Information and Bayesian statistics to a qualitative study.  This methodology aims to provide a statistic to represent qualitative research findings that can be applied systematically and with credibility to decision-making and prediction.  the use of Bayesian statistics and its particular form of information theory is not concerned with confidence levels, but with the amount of information in favor of an event happening.  Rather than rejecting a hypothesis, or in the case of qualitative research, a theory or proposition leading to theory formulation, a certain threshold related to the value of the information can be used to make a decision.  Unlike classical statistics, this theory is not dependent on large samples that generate degrees of confidence levels based on frequencies of events.  This is an interesting direction for the evolution of ethnographic research, offering a quantitative tool to the qualitative researcher for context-specific investigations such as those that seek to determine the efficacy of instructional interventions.  This research also addresses the criticism of qualitative research as a subjective, "unscientific" methodology in the high stakes testing, scientifically oriented world of education today.