Abstract
Huge resources are invested in metrology and standards in the natural sciences, engineering, and across a wide range of commercial technologies. Significant positive returns of human, social, environmental, and economic value on these investments have been sustained for decades. Proven methods for calibrating test and survey instruments in linear units are readily available, as are data- and theory-based methods for equating those instruments to a shared unit. Using these methods, metrological traceability is obtained in a variety of commercially available elementary and secondary English and Spanish language reading education programs in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Australia. Given established historical patterns, widespread routine reproduction of predicted text-based and instructional effects expressed in a common language and shared frame of reference may lead to significant developments in theory and practice. Opportunities for systematic implementations of teacher-driven lean thinking and continuous quality improvement methods may be of particular interest and value.
Highlights
Metrology connects measurement applications across industrial, scientific, and practical tasks separated by space and time
The solution arose when one publisher incorporated the unit in their own system, involving both a reading curriculum and a reading assessment system. This coordinated reader-text matching made the link to the unit more attractive to testing agencies, who could point to an additional use for their results; to book publishers, who were assured of a population of students with measures to match with their books; and to state departments of education and school districts, who could effectively put the matching system to work
Historians of science have repeatedly documented the roles in theory development played by researchers with hands-on experience with instrumentation, as when Kuhn [59] notes that seven of the nine pioneers in quantifying energy conversion processes were either trained as engineers or were working with engines when they made their contributions. This attitude that an instrument can make a science was taken from physics into economics by both Stanley Jevons and Irving Fisher in their uses of the balance scale as a model of market equilibrium [60,61]
Summary
Metrology connects measurement applications across industrial, scientific, and practical tasks separated by space and time. New insights into how cognitive, social and technological resources aid in creating shared cultural frames of reference have emerged from close critical study of historical and contemporary scientific modelling and metrological practices From this perspective, science is not qualitatively different from everyday ways of thinking and relating, except in more deliberately extending laboratory processes into the world as distributed cognitive systems supporting a range of associated problem-solving methods [1,2,3,4,5]. Not knowing when or how reference standard units are established reinforces unexamined metaphysical assumptions—such as the idea that the universe or nature is inherently and innately numerical, quantitative, or mathematical—that rarely become explicit objects of attention The effect of these presuppositions is significant. Two questions emerge here: (1) how did the natural sciences succeed in making quantities seem so thoroughly natural [3,4,9,10,11,12], and (2) how might the social sciences learn from those successes? Recent advances in reading measurement embody important lessons in this regard for the social sciences
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