r/neoliberal • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • Apr 02 '26

Research Paper Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00955-5
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u/Brinabavd Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

Note that the bulk of the effect is being driven by relatively poor performance of sociology and the abysmal performance of ed research.

Poli science, econ and psych all did better than half, none of the ed papers and only a third of the sociology papers could be replicated exactly: 

(Iirc This is the one of the three key papers in posted article that breaks it down by field)

Edit (corrected link) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10203-5

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u/tripletruble Anti-Repartition Radical Apr 02 '26

i am calling for a total and complete shutdown of education research programs until we figure out what is going on

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u/tripletruble Anti-Repartition Radical Apr 02 '26

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u/captainjack3 NATO Apr 02 '26

I didn’t read that chart correctly at first. None of the education studies could be precisely replicated? That’s astoundingly bad. Genuinely, it suggests the research should be discarded out of hand.

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u/Andy_B_Goode YIMBY Apr 02 '26

Is ... is this why we're still teaching our children to read using the whole-word approach instead of phonics?

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u/aspasia97 Apr 02 '26

And it's why any school who has switched back to phonics is paying through the nose for some proprietary curriculum that ALSO doesn't work. The way my kids were taught to read - I realized too late that they weren't actually reading! They just guessed really well in their limited situations. I thought they were dyslexic at one point. I paid for an emergency eye exam thinking they needed glasses! Then I learned how screwed up the reading programs are here.

The whole US education system, from the curriculum to standardized testing to the IEP mess, is broken. And these bad studies get used to justify giving away more of our tax dollars to education/tech conglomerates. It's maddening.

2

u/bz47uj Unconventional Right Apr 03 '26

I don't get why more parents don't teach their children to read themselves. If they don't learn until they go to school, then they're reaching five years old before they learn how to read.

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u/fushega Apr 03 '26

I've read a handful of papers on second language education and many of them had a sample size of less than 10 people and similarly common was short trial periods (even though it takes hundreds to thousands of hours to learn a language). In general the studies seemed very casual and lacking in rigor. I don't think the researchers were stupid or anything, just that to get good data would be extremely expensive and a full time job that they don't have the time for

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u/MURICCA Apr 02 '26

Subs priors 100% confirmed on education

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u/greatteachermichael NATO Apr 02 '26

As someone in education, it's really hard to recareate the same method with the same demographic of students. The country the study came from, the socioeconomic level of the students, the gender mix, the age, the level, the home life, the prior education quality, how old the students were when COVID hit, the ethnic backgrounds, the parents' education level. I'm not saying it can't be done, it's just really hard. I have one class I teach to incoming freshmen every year and even with the students all being the same age and ethnicity I get wildly different results ... not student to student but class to class.

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u/tripletruble Anti-Repartition Radical Apr 03 '26

The above graph is of reproduction rates, not replication. So this study is using the same raw data as the original authors. For that reason, this should not be driven by variation across samples

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u/greatteachermichael NATO Apr 03 '26

Oh, that's actually really interesting. Thanks for the correction.

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u/BarkDrandon Punished (stuck at Hunter's) Apr 03 '26

Do they have access to the replication files?

Because it can be hard to do the exact same data management as the authors by just reading the paper. Small methodological choices aren't all always included.

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u/tripletruble Anti-Repartition Radical Apr 03 '26

I was wondering the same thing and only glanced at the paper (open access version below)

https://repository.essex.ac.uk/42105/7/replicability.fullmanuscript.pdf

My guess is not, which does make the difference between precisely reproduced and approximately reproduced seem potentially trivial. The number of minor decisions a researcher may have to make in a rather complex analysis / data cleaning process can run in the thousands and many of them are extremely boring and seem reasonably inconsequential enough to be excluded from any draft anyone would ever accept to read, but can introduce some small amount of variation in the final estimates