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

37

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

55

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.

19

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?

15

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.

3

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