You mean Education Science? I'm currently studying it (besides my day job), probably writing my bachelor's thesis next semester.
Unfortunately, in my experience there are several shortcomings of the field (or at least typical bachelor's master's programs outside teachers's preparation, which is separate in Germany).
They love to talk about interdisciplinarity, and will even call out neuroscience and psychology often. In practice, it's mostly a social sciences field, and as such has been taken over by constructivism. Now, while learning is obviously (IMO) a constructive activity, they will "explain" everything with "handwave... social construction... handwave", while dismissing e.g. neuroscience aspects as "not a learning theory" and thus not worthy of discussion.
The statistical sophistication is very, very low. It's not all linear regression, but mostly, and even when it isn't there is no (even implicit) discussion of causality, just adding all variables (what McElreath calls "causal salad).
I do my PhD in management as part of organization studies, I know some good folk doing education. So don't be too disappointed in the beginning, it might be just your profs, or your uni. Just search quickly with Google Scholar, and there is this Fischer et al. (2010) that looks like a good summary responding to your comment. If my impression from my colleagues is correct, UK seems to be a good place for grad school in education. Just from an epistemological standpoint there is Mahadevan (2020) and Romani et al. (2018) where you can see where the field is going.
Fischer, K. W., Goswami, U., Geake, J., & Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience. (2010). The future of educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4(2), 68-80.
Mahadevan, J. (2020). Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(2), 228-251.
Romani, L., Barmeyer, C., Primecz, H., & Pilhofer, K. (2018). Cross-cultural management studies: state of the field in the four research paradigms. International Studies of Management & Organization, 48(3), 247-263.
I agree with most of everything you have said. That is common in many places, but exceptions are also regular enough to give good hope, and moreso in the post-graduate arena from what I have seen. Most of the people I know in this field work on or with theories that are more socio- than neuro-, but the balance is different at each institution.
Fortunately I see some very high quality and rigorous research techniques applied (with much less handwaving away of neuroscience) among my friends, but I don't need to look far for contrast. I don't work directly in this area, but am present for the pub discussions as it were.
However, I would say that statistical sophistication often seems to rely on the happenstance of cross-domain expertise. People only have so much time, knowledge, etc -- just the usual faults of humanity and organisations.
I've had several doctoral students and teaching assistants tell me (with variations) that they aren't good in "that math stuff" and that they don't think it really matters; they are doing "best practices" in SPSS and it's much more important to look at it in a holistic way.
In theory they would be right. If the best practices were sane.
But I also think it is going to get better, only very slowly. At some point there has to be cross-pollination with other fields.
Check out programs and communities of practice in the field of “learning engineering.” Strong attention to controlled experiments, data mining, human-centered design, among other things. Carnegie Mellon is one center.
Education is one area where individual departments vary wildly across the US.
Some programs have really embraced neuroscience etc, but there’s minimal incentives for schools to keep up to date. Teachers going back for a masters don’t actually need anything more than a degree in hand to get a higher wage at their existing job. Which then feeds back into how these programs are setup and managed.
I guess you're studying "Erziehungswissenschaften"? You might find that educational psychology ("Pädagogische Psychologie") has a lot of the depth you would expect. One nice example is cognitive load theory.
One of the more complex mathematical treatments of learning are "knowledge and learning spaces". But it seems they get bogged down a lot in implementation details (= conflating implementation with interface behaviour). And: It's a bit to simplistic. For example, talking about things like the "expertise reversal effect" in this framework is not straightforward.
No, Bildungswissenschaft. But yes, I found out some way along my studies that I'm actually really interested in parts of psychology. Henry Roediger's research, for example.
Unfortunately, in my experience there are several shortcomings of the field (or at least typical bachelor's master's programs outside teachers's preparation, which is separate in Germany).
They love to talk about interdisciplinarity, and will even call out neuroscience and psychology often. In practice, it's mostly a social sciences field, and as such has been taken over by constructivism. Now, while learning is obviously (IMO) a constructive activity, they will "explain" everything with "handwave... social construction... handwave", while dismissing e.g. neuroscience aspects as "not a learning theory" and thus not worthy of discussion.
The statistical sophistication is very, very low. It's not all linear regression, but mostly, and even when it isn't there is no (even implicit) discussion of causality, just adding all variables (what McElreath calls "causal salad).