On Replicability: Why We Don’t Celebrate Viking Day

I was recently in Oslo, Norway’s capital, and visited a wonderful museum displaying three Viking ships that had been buried with important people. The museum had all sorts of displays focused on the amazing exploits of Viking ships, always including the Viking landings in Newfoundland, about 500 years before Columbus. Since the 1960s, most people have known that Vikings, not Columbus, were the first Europeans to land in America. So why do we celebrate Columbus Day, not Viking Day?

Given the bloodthirsty actions of Columbus, easily rivaling those of the Vikings, we surely don’t prefer one to the other based on their charming personalities. Instead, we celebrate Columbus Day because what Columbus did was far more important. The Vikings knew how to get back to Newfoundland, but they were secretive about it. Columbus was eager to publicize and repeat his discovery. It was this focus on replication that opened the door to regular exchanges. The Vikings brought back salted cod. Columbus brought back a new world.

In educational research, academics often imagine that if they establish new theories or demonstrate new methods on a small scale, and then publish their results in reputable journals, their job is done. Call this the Viking model: they got what they wanted (promotions or salt cod), and who cares if ordinary people found out about it? Even if the Vikings had published their findings in the Viking Journal of Exploration, this would have had roughly the same effect as educational researchers publishing in their own research journals.

Columbus, in contrast, told everyone about his voyages, and very publicly repeated and extended them. His brutal leadership ended with him being sent back to Spain in chains, but his discoveries had resounding impacts that long outlived him.

Educational researchers only want to do good, but they are unlikely to have any impact at all unless they can make their ideas useful to educators. Many educational researchers would love to make their ideas into replicable programs, evaluate these programs in schools, and if they are found to be effective, disseminate them broadly. However, resources for the early stages of development and research are scarce. Yes, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and Education Innovation Research (EIR) fund a lot of development projects, and Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) provides small grants for this purpose to for-profit companies. Yet these funders support only a tiny proportion of the proposals they receive. In England, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) spends a lot on randomized evaluations of promising programs, but very little on development or early-stage research. Innovations that are funded by government or other funding very rarely end up being evaluated in large experiments, fewer still are found to be effective, and vanishingly few eventually enter widespread use. The exceptions are generally programs crated by large for-profit companies, large and entrepreneurial non-profits, or other entities with proven capacity to develop, evaluate, support, and disseminate programs at scale. Even the most brilliant developers and researchers rarely have the interest, time, capital, business expertise, or infrastructure to nurture effective programs through all the steps necessary to bring a practical and effective program to market. As a result, most educational products introduced at scale to schools come from commercial publishers or software companies, who have the capital and expertise to create and disseminate educational programs, but serve a market that primarily wants attractive, inexpensive, easy-to-use materials, software, and professional development, and is not (yet) willing to pay for programs proven to be effective. I discussed this problem in a recent blog on technology, but the same dynamics apply to all innovations, tech and non-tech alike.

How Government Can Promote Proven, Replicable Programs

There is an old saying that Columbus personified the spirit of research. He didn’t know where he was going, he didn’t know where he was when he got there, and he did it all on government funding. The relevant part of this is the government funding. In Columbus’ time, only royalty could afford to support his voyage, and his grant from Queen Isabella was essential to his success. Yet Isabella was not interested in pure research. She was hoping that Columbus might open rich trade routes to the (east) Indies or China, or might find gold or silver, or might acquire valuable new lands for the crown (all of these things did eventually happen). Educational research, development, and dissemination face a similar situation. Because education is virtually a government monopoly, only government is capable of sustained, sizable funding of research, development, and dissemination, and only the U.S. government has the acknowledged responsibility to improve outcomes for the 50 million American children ages 4-18 in its care. So what can government do to accelerate the research-development-dissemination process?

1. Contract with “seed bed” organizations capable of identifying and supporting innovators with ideas likely to make a difference in student learning. These organizations might be rewarded, in part, based on the number of proven programs they are able to help create, support, and (if effective) ultimately disseminate.
2. Contract with independent third-party evaluators capable of doing rigorous evaluations of promising programs. These organizations would evaluate promising programs from any source, not just from seed bed companies, as they do now in IES, EIR, and EEF grants.
3. Provide funding for innovators with demonstrated capacity to create programs likely to be effective and funding to disseminate them if they are proven effective. Developers may also contract with “seed bed” organizations to help program developers succeed with development and dissemination.
4. Provide information and incentive funding to schools to encourage them to adopt proven programs, as described in a recent blog on technology.  Incentives should be available on a competitive basis to a broad set of schools, such as all Title I schools, to engage many schools in adoption of proven programs.

Evidence-based reform in education has made considerable progress in the past 15 years, both in finding positive examples that are in use today and in finding out what is not likely to make substantial differences. It is time for this movement to go beyond its early achievements to enter a new phase of professionalism, in which collaborations among developers, researchers, and disseminators can sustain a much faster and more reliable process of research, development, and dissemination. It’s time to move beyond the Viking stage of exploration to embrace the good parts of the collaboration between Columbus and Queen Isabella that made a substantial and lasting change in the whole world.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

When Developers Commission Studies, What Develops?

I have the greatest respect for commercial developers and disseminators of educational programs, software, and professional development. As individuals, I think they genuinely want to improve the practice of education, and help produce better outcomes for children. However, most developers are for-profit companies, and they have shareholders who are focused on the bottom line. So when developers carry out evaluations, or commission evaluation companies to do so on their behalf, perhaps it’s best to keep in mind a bit of dialogue from a Marx Brothers movie. Someone asks Groucho if Chico is honest. “Sure,” says Groucho, “As long as you watch him!”

         A healthy role for developers in evidence-based reform in education is desirable. Publishers, software developers, and other commercial companies have a lot of capital, and a strong motivation to create new products with evidence of effectiveness that will stand up to scrutiny. In medicine, most advances in practical drugs and treatments are made by drug companies. If you’re a cynic, this may sound disturbing. But for a long time, the federal government has encouraged drug companies to do development and evaluation of new drugs, but they have strict rules about what counts as conclusive evidence. Basically, the government says, following Groucho, “Are drug companies honest? Sure, as long as you watch ‘em.”

            In our field, we may want to think about how to do this. As one contribution, my colleague Betsy Wolf did some interesting research on outcomes of studies sponsored by developers, compared to those conducted by independent, third parties. She looked at all reading/literacy and math studies listed on the What Works Clearinghouse database. The first thing she found was very disturbing. Sure enough, the effect sizes for the developer-commissioned studies (ES = +0.27, n=73) were twice as large as those for independent studies (ES = +0.13, n=96). That’s a huge difference.

Being a curious person, Betsy wanted to know why developer-commissioned studies had effect sizes that were so much larger than independent ones. We now know a lot about study characteristics that inflate effect sizes. The most inflationary are small sample size, use of measures made by researchers or developers (rather than independent measures), and use of quasi-experiments instead of randomized designs. Developer-commissioned studies were in fact much more likely to use researcher/developer-made measures (29% in developer-commissioned vs. 8% in independent studies), and randomized vs. quasi-experiments (51% quasi-experiments for developer-commissioned studies vs. 15% quasi-experiments for independent studies). However, sample sizes were similar in developer-commissioned and independent studies. And most surprising, statistically controlling for all of these factors did not reduce the developer effect by very much.

If there is so much inflation of effect sizes in developer-commissioned studies, then how come controlling for the largest factors that usually cause effect size inflation does not explain the developer effect?

There is a possible reason for this, which Betsy cautiously advances (since it cannot be proven). Perhaps the reason that effect sizes are inflated in developer-commissioned studies is not due to the nature of the studies we can find, but to the studies we cannot find. There has long been recognition of what is called the “file drawer effect,” which happens when studies that do not obtain a positive outcome disappear (into a file drawer). Perhaps developers are especially likely to hide disappointing findings. Unlike academic studies, which are likely to exist as technical reports or dissertations, perhaps commercial companies have no incentive to make null findings findable in any form.

This may not be true, or it may be true of some but not other developers. But if government is going to start taking evidence a lot more seriously, as it has done with the ESSA evidence standards (see www.evidenceforessa.org), it is important to prevent developers, or any researchers, from hiding their null findings.

There is a solution to this problem that is heading rapidly in our direction. This is pre-registration. In pre-registration, researchers or evaluators must file a study design, measures, and analyses about to be used in a study, but perhaps most importantly, pre-registration announces that a study exists, or will exist soon. If a developer pre-registered a study but that study never showed up in the literature, this might be a cause for losing faith in the developer. Imagine that the What Works Clearinghouse, Evidence for ESSA, and journals refused to accept research reports on programs unless the study had been pre-registered, and unless all other studies of the program were made available.

Some areas of medicine use pre-registration, and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness is moving toward introducing a pre-registration process for education. Use of pre-registration and other safeguards could be a boon to commercial developers, as it is to drug companies, because it could build public confidence in developer-sponsored research. Admittedly, it would take many years and/or a lot more investment in educational research to make this practical, but there are concrete steps we could take in that direction.

I’m not sure I see any reason we shouldn’t move toward pre-registration. It would be good for Groucho, good for Chico, and good for kids. And that’s good enough for me!

Photo credit: By Paramount Pictures (source) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.