Each theorist is often an expert in their own ideas
The comment by Cynthia, an anynomous reader, on the entry Shadow » Blog Archive » Phonological Awareness is not a marker offers her personal observations on troubles kids run into learning to read. This one strikes me in particular, and links to my last post on research and modeling approaches.
Cynthia Says:
July 1st, 2005 at 4:00 pmI do not believe that many theories have failed scrutiny because they do not offer some truth to this puzzle about reading. I believe they have failed because we learn so differently, and that adds too many pieces to the puzzle.
I couldn’t agree more. The traditional Individual Differences approach in psychology is an inadequate framework because it assumes a single structure with parametric variations among individuals. Hierarchical modeling, mixture models, Bayesian and other methodological mirracles are not the cure either.
I think that many of the theories, have very important pieces to add, and should not be ignored but should not be held up singularly either. We need a more homogenous approach to interpreting the relationships between the theories. That may be hard right now because each theorist is often an expert in their own ideas.
(I like the the quantifier "often" in the last sentence, which imply that sometimes they (we?) are not expert in their (our?) own ideas. Great point.)