Despite the practice of cooperative education for more than a century (late 1800s in UK, 1906 in USA and 1957 in Canada) it cannot be regarded as a mature science as yet, because it has a relatively small body of scholarly knowledge.
My wife is reading (among a dozen/more books) Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe, the scientific truth of psychic phenomena and shared his views of the effect size of evidence with me. The research issues in vivo learning practitioners should be concerned about, in my opinion, include among others:
- the number of replicable experiments documented in peer reviewed journals
- the history of science reveals that discoveries are initially weak and sporadic (what is the rate concerning cooperative education?)
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only by hard work and technical refinement of research do a community of practice arrive at a degree of reliability of a mature science
The coordinators of cooperative education in higher education in South Africa are often offended by my statements that we do not have a substantial body of knowledge. I am sorry that I step on toes, but facts are facts.