I'm curious what's the difference between "observational science" and "cognitive science"?
I assume it means the former is just one person theorizing from his personal experience as a teacher? That's what we call "observational science"?
Where as the cognitive labs, they tried to setup some experiments and did some double blind? Or was it more looking at brain activation?
Observational: watch kids, come up with correlations in behavior, then with controls identify causation.
Cognitive: watch kids, but pay attention to details and pair them with models of relevant psychological/cognitive models. Ideally, the models help explain the details, or the details help update the models.
Cognitive models have much more explanatory and prediction power. But are not much help, no help, or misleading, wherever there are no good models yet.
Given cognition is nowhere near a complete model, more a (not entirely consistent) patchwork of a great variety of models, both approaches remain important.
So in this case, both can corroborate their findings because both demonstrate success in learning to read?
Since you said both look at controls to assess that they're better than random ?
But from the article, it seems to imply there hasn't been controls applied to the three cues system. Therefore it would have always remained just some children become good readers with this methods, so it probably works.
And what I'm not able to gather is, how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
> how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
Good question!
Psychology is so complex, my guess is there isn't a clear difference between the two types of studies, but lots of variation in individual paper quality for both.