I finally made time to sit and read this precise, critical research article on edTPA. One might call the article quantitative ether. It reminds me of something Greg Dimitriadis wrote in his 2012 book, Critical Dispositions. A great deal of the book is about evidence in social science education research. It says a lot about research methods and methodologies too. Here is the specific excerpt the article brought me back to:

There has tended to be an unfortunate conflation of epistemological and methodological concerns in both the literature and “received wisdom” on research. That is to say, the assumption is often that those with an interpretive orientation use qualitative research methods, whereas those with a positivist orientation use quantitative methods. In addition, there is also an assumption that the former tend to be more progressive in disposition, and the latter more conservative. (p. 105)

The authors of the article don’t position their inquiry as an overtly critical or progressive one. In my read, they take deliberate steps early on to avoid some of the more charged controversies around the exams, and I wish they hadn’t. They almost apologize at the end of this article for their “quite unusual” recommendation that states place a moratorium on the edTPA. But the article does what Greg argued in this chapter and in this excerpt, and that is refreshing to me.