In their essay, "Why Assessment Will Never Work...," Bacon and Stewart (2016) recommend that instead of carrying out the expensive process of experimenting themselves, many business schools would get a bigger bang for their buck if they used "published pedagogical studies that use direct measures of learning with sufficient…

This letter documents some problems in Ancaiani et al. (2015). Namely the evaluation of concordance, based on Cohen's kappa, reported by Ancaiani et al. was not computed on the whole random sample of 9,199 articles, but on a subset of 7,597 articles. The kappas relative to the whole random sample were in the range 0.07-0.15, indicating an…

White and Gorard make important and relevant criticisms of some of the methods commonly used in social science research, but go further by criticising the logical basis for inferential statistical tests. This paper comments briefly on matters we broadly agree on with them and more fully on matters where we disagree. We agree that too little…

In this report, a school choice advocacy group presents results from its survey of K-12 parents within and across the public and private sectors. They report that parents are highly satisfied with voucher and tax credit scholarship programs and suggest that the findings support the expansion of school choice programs. However, these and other…

The authors of the study "The Long-Term Impact of Teachers" claim that their study shows that increases in teacher value-added lead to significant and lasting increases in test scores and significant increases in income that will last throughout adulthood. Instead, I show that these claims are false because they are contradicted by the…

The Coleman report, "Equality of Educational Opportunity," is the fountainhead for those committed to evidence-based education policy. Remarkably, this 737-page tome, prepared 50 years ago by seven authors under the leadership of James S. Coleman, still gets a steady 600 Google Scholar citations per year. But since its publication, views…

As an alternative to statistical testing, effect size has a non-monotonic linkage with practical importance. Besides random variance and systematic bias, a proper interpretation of effect size hinges on its implication to outcomes of deductive and/or inductive enquiries. Consequently, a small effect size might suggest an important finding, and the…

Three criticisms of overreliance on results from statistical significance tests are noted. It is suggested that: (1) statistical significance tests are often tautological; (2) some uses can involve comparisons that are not completely sensible; and (3) using statistical significance tests to evaluate both methodological assumptions (e.g., the…

Barcikowski has provided tables for use in situations where means are to be used as the unit of analysis. This article argues that the conditions specified for use of these tables are not practical. It explicates a methodology for carrying out analyses based on group means. (Author/JAZ)