Curios of the week #37

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Ballarat Clarendon College, where I work, has a beautiful set of campuses. There is our Junior Campus in Mair Street, Ballarat, and our Senior Campus on Sturt Street, Ballarat. We also have a campus at Yuulong on the Great Ocean Road where our Year 9 students spend a term.

One of the reasons the Ballarat Campuses are so attractive is that as they have grown, they have encompassed old Ballarat houses that front the surrounding streets. One forms an art gallery where we display students’ work. Another is the face of our performing arts centre. However, a critical factor is culture. It is part of our school culture to look after these campuses. A building that opened in 2007 still looks fresh and new. This is not because we have magic children who never consider littering or drawing graffiti, it is just that we try to address these issues as soon as they happen because we understand their importance.

Those of you working in government schools probably want to shout, ‘Resources!’ at me right now and it is true that as an independent school, we do have the resources available to look after our buildings in a way government schools may not. However, when I visited Michaela Community School in London in July this year, I noticed something similar. Michaela is situated in an old office block quite unsuitable for a school. It has no playing fields and the only open space is the former car park where the students play basketball. Having given this over to the students, the teachers all take public transport. Yet the campus is immaculate and I can only assume it is not because Michaela children are magic either, but because they pay close attention to the state of the facilities. Often, it’s the small things that count.

This week’s Curios include the replication crisis, guidance for teachers, an ongoing slow-motion disaster and much more.

Replicability crisis news of the week

Psychology and by extension, educational psychology, has been enduring a replication crisis where an effect noted in one study cannot be found when other teams of researchers attempt to replicate that study. The very fact we know there is a crisis places educational psychology ahead of traditional education research where little attempt is usually made to replicate anything.

However, there is hope. A new paper in Nature reports on attempts by four different labs to work together using best practices to replicate 16 experimental findings:

“In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (P < 0.05) in 86% of attempts, slightly exceeding the maximum expected replicability based on observed effect sizes and sample sizes.”

This is good news. How did they do it? With, “confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency.” Methodological transparency is key. It seems like an obvious point, but it is impossible to faithfully replicate an experiment if we don’t exactly what the original authors did.

When I first read a new experimental study, after the abstract, I turn straight to the methods section to see whether it is worth reading on. Too many studies use poor control conditions or have other flaws. Surprisingly often, I am left with questions. For example, the control condition that an intervention is being pitted against is often not described in any detail.

We now know what we need to do to improve.

Tweet of the week

Sometimes, the finding from a research study seems so extraordinary that our first reaction is to doubt it. Our second is then to wonder what it would mean if it were true.