Pamela Moss


Member Since: 2015

Pamela Moss is the John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education at the University of Michigan.  Her scholarship engages the critical potential of methodological pluralism in education research:  how it is and might be theorized, practiced, taught, supported by organizational and governmental policies, and embedded in the evolving infrastructures through which knowledge is produced and used to orient action in complex educational contexts. Initially she explored methodological pluralism in the context of educational assessment:  how different methodologies complement and challenge conceptions of validity and enable understandings of how educators actually interpret and use assessments.  Her focus on methodological pluralism grew into a more general interest in research on the role of evidence in educational policy and practice.  This line of work culminated in a book-length chapter, “Engaging Methodological Pluralism”, written with psychometrician Edward Haertel, published in the 5th edition of AERA’s benchmark Handbook of Research on Teaching.  Her current research, in collaboration with UM School of Information colleague, Carl Lagoze, focuses on knowledge infrastructures (KIs) in education research–dynamic relationships among policies, practices, norms, resources, social structures, and technologies, as well as methodologies, through which knowledge is produced.   Goals for this line of work are both critical and generative: to build an argument for/illustrate the value of infrastructural studies in education research; highlight affordances and limitations in our current KIs; draw on KI-relevant resources outside education to illustrate possibilities for infrastructural design (and its consequences); and engage by example in intentional, participatory infrastructural design and formative evaluation to explore alternatives.

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