Campbell's law

Campbell's law is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell,[1] a psychologist and social scientist who often wrote about research methodology. The law states "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." (p. 85) On a similar note, Campbell also wrote:

achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)[1]

Campbell's law can be seen as an example of the cobra effect. The social science principle of Campbell's law is sometimes used to point out the negative consequences of high-stakes testing in U.S. classrooms.[2] This may take the form of teaching to the test or outright cheating.[3] An example is "The High-Stakes Education Rule" as described in the Learning-Disadvantage Gap.[4]

Similar rules

There are closely related ideas known by different names, such as Goodhart's law and the Lucas critique. Another concept related to Campbell's law emerged in 2006 when UK researchers Rebecca Boden and Debbie Epstein published an analysis of evidence-based policy, a practice espoused by Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the paper, Boden and Epstein described how a government that tries to base its policy on evidence can actually end up producing corrupted data because it "seeks to capture and control the knowledge producing processes to the point where this type of 'research' might best be described as 'policy-based evidence'."[5]

When someone distorts decisions in order to improve the performance measure, they often surrogate, coming to believe that the measure is a better measure of true performance than it really is.[6]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 Campbell, Donald T. "Assessing the impact of planned social change". Evaluation and Program Planning. 2 (1): 67–90. doi:10.1016/0149-7189(79)90048-X.
  2. ↑ What is Campbell's Law Diane Ravich's Blog 25 May, 2012
  3. ↑ Aviv, Rachel (21 July 2014). "Wrong Answer". The New Yorker.
  4. ↑ http://www.allartsallkids.org/learning_disadvantage_gap.html
  5. ↑ Boden, Rebecca; Epstein, Debbie (2006). "Managing the research imagination? Globalisation and research in higher education". Globalisation, Societies and Education. 4: 223–236.
  6. ↑ Bentley, Jeremiah W. (2017-02-24). "Decreasing Operational Distortion and Surrogation through Narrative Reporting". Rochester, NY. SSRN 2924726 Freely accessible.

References

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