ReThinking & Expanding Our Knowledge of Knowledge: Understandability

If you do an Internet search about academic articles being difficult to read, you will get thousands of results. In fact, even in the hard sciences (specifically biology), there is evidence that most academic readers are frustrated when reading research papers1 and there is evidence that this is getting worse over time in all the sciences2.

Thus, in the learning sciences, there is an irony that research papers that are meant to provide knowledge about how to improve learning are often in and of themselves difficult to understand.

So, if most research papers, including doctoral research are difficult to understand and frustrating to read by even academics, then it is not a stretch to think it would be even more frustrating for educators and other practitioners who aren't steeped in the academic jargon. Thus, how can most contemporary doctoral dissertations in the field of education make a "significant" contribution to the field, if the research cannot be easily understood by most people in that field???

And, this is not just a "practical" problem. It is a deep epistemological problem, one that isn't addressed by most philosophers. For example, while the peer-reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the topic of "epistemology"3 implicitly implies that knowledge only exists when there is a "knower", or as it says:

First, we must determine the nature of knowledge; that is, what does it mean to say that someone knows, or fails to know, something?

After this, while the article addresses the question about whether what someone believes can or cannot be considered knowledge, there is no mention that in order for someone to have knowledge they must learn and understand the knowledge. Thus, while scientific studies in all fields, including education, attempt to be rigorous in having the knowledge produced being trustworthy as being actual knowledge, there is clearly a lack of rigor of having the knowledge being as easily understood as possible. And if research is not understandable, then there isn't knowledge, by definition; only mere information.

This appears to be especially a blind spot in the learning sciences, where their major purpose is to learn and disseminate knowledge to improve learning. Yet, one only needs to start to read most academic journals related to education and/or learning and realize that far more work was done to see that wording tends to lack understandability by those who are not engrossed in their specific subdiscipline.

I make this point here, because I take seriously the mission of my doctoral research and writings to make a "significant original contribution" to the field of education. But I recognize that if I write in a style that is meant to convey meaning in a manner that is more understandable to more people, including "breaking" rules at times, that I need to be able to defend that choice on the very basis of epistemology and scientific philosophy.

This will likely make it more difficult to write my doctoral research, because it also will need to have sufficient standard rigor. And as I have found from even writing this small article, my initial wording was not as understandable as it could be. Further, nuanced knowledge (which is often the deeper knowledge) takes time to be able to explain in an understandable manner, where the initial knowledge presented may not be entirely accurate, but is sufficiently valid for initial reading, and then greater accuracy can come. But I will address this more when I address pragmatic validity.

Works Cited

1 ? Katherine Hubbard; Perceptions of scientific research literature and strategies for reading papers depend on academic career stage, PLoS One. 2017; 12(12): e0189753. doi:?10.1371/journal.pone.0189753

2 ? Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science is getting harder to read: From obscure acronyms to unnecessary jargon, research papers are increasingly impenetrable – even for scientists. Nature Index, Springer Nature, 10 September 2020

3 ? David Truncellito, Ph.D. ; "Epistemology" The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) (ISSN 2161-0002)