Can Educational Research Be Replaced by Intuition and Experience?

Teachers must often rely on their intuition and experience because of insufficient empirical research evidence on all pedagogical issues in the teaching process. Some even argue that experience is adequate for effective teaching and that many research findings are self-evident. If this assumption were true, teachers would be able to distinguish right from wrong statements without prior knowledge of relevant research findings. Therefore, future teachers were asked to indicate in a questionnaire if they thought that a number of statements concerning instructional quality were actual findings of educational research or not and to explain their reasoning. This study will contend that it is not always reliable for teachers to trust their experiences and intuition when it comes to answering many pedagogical questions.