New paper: Morocco's Pioneer Middle Schools—a government-led whole-school reform—improved socioemotional skills, tripled year-on-year learning, reduced dropout ~1/3. "Beyond Basics" w/ Campos Quintero, El Amrani Mida, Glewwe, Kumar, and Lépine de-barros.com/publication/... @cega-uc.bsky.social

Don’t Do Difference In Differences (DDDID), cheers, guido

Excited to share a new paper with @jfischman, just accepted at JEL. We argue that empirical research tends to be biased and overconfident due to a weakness in the dominant econometric framework: insufficient attention paid to humans “in the loop” with the research process. 1/

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Tyler Watts, @emmarosehart.bsky.social, & @drewhalbailey.bsky.social analyze 87 RCTs & find that fadeout is common across most programs. Intervention characteristics explain only a small share of differences in persistence. 📄 bit.ly/4aGrXY4

Why do educational intervention impacts fade? Isn't catch-up a good thing? Are sleeper effects real? Does fadeout mean failure? @drewhalbailey.bsky.social, Tyler Watts, and I address these questions & more in an EdNext piece & 4 new working papers! www.educationnext.org/why-do-most-...

Why Do Most Education Interventions Fade Out Over Time?

There is evidence both to explain and complicate the “fadeout effect”

educationnext.org

Replying to @bwroberts.bsky.social on cross-lagged panel models open.substack.com/pub/drewhalb...

Replying to Brent on cross lagged panel models

Last week, Brent Roberts blogged on “The Inconceivability of the CLPM and RI-CLPM”.

open.substack.com

Person at talk translating all model descriptions into formal equations is the academic talk version of the person filling out the scorecard at a baseball game.

This fetid landmark, this historical stain on humanity is primarily due to the stunningly reckless obliteration of America's foreign assistance agency earlier this year. Led by the richest man on earth. In secret, on a weekend. With zero analysis or discussion of its catastrophic impacts.

For First Time in Decades, Child Deaths Will Rise This Year

Almost a quarter of a million more children around the world are projected to die in 2025 than in 2024.

wsj.com

Fadeout of cognitive training remains one of the more replicable findings in psychology in this preregistered study of 300 preschool children. Well-done study with a 4 year follow up. The language gains either faded or the control group caught up. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Interested in models used to estimate lagged effects in panel data? We (@rebiweidmann.bsky.social, Hyewon Yang) have a new paper looking at patterns of stability and their implications for bias and model choice: osf.io/preprints/ps... [1/x]

Collider effect in the real world!

Sanjay Srivastava@sanjaysrivastava.com · 12mo ago

Protip: If you go to an Indian restaurant in America, and it's all aloo gobi this and tikka masala that, but there's a dish or two that you don't recognize - get it. There's a very good chance it's a regional specialty from where the owners grew up and it will be delicious

About 2/3 of the posts on this platform linking to the recent NYT article on null findings from Baby’s First Years have this reaction. You can search the headline and verify yourself! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

Study May Undercut Idea That Cash Payments to Poor Families Help Child Development

nytimes.com

John Holbein@johnholbein1.bsky.social · 12mo ago

You know? I've changed my mind. We should celebrate those who respond to science by saying "I'm not surprised." These folks are oracles! They intuit the direction, significance, magnitude, heterogeneities, & mechanisms for all possible studies. They should be cherished & protected at all costs.

I used Paige’s first book in a class students with a wide range of previous exposure to and attitudes about behavior genetics, and they all seem to find it very interesting. Will probably try this one too!

Random Intercepts and Slopes in Longitudinal Models: When Are They "Good" and "Bad" Controls? or Illusory Traits 2: Revenge of the Slopes Led by Siling Guo, with Nicolas Hübner, Steffen Zitzmann, Martin Hecht, and Kou Murayama. Comments welcome! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New blog post! Let's say you've measured two variables repeatedly and want to investigate how one affects the other over time. Here are some recommendations for how to do that well. www.the100.ci/2025/06/25/r...

Reviewer notes: So you’re interested in “lagged effects.”

In some fields, researchers who end up with time series of two variables of interest (X and Y) like to analyze (reciprocal) lagged effects between them. Does X affect Y at a later point in time, and d...

the100.ci

6) LCGAs never replicate across datasets or in the same dataset. They usually just produce the salsa pattern (Hi/med/low) or the cats cradle (Hi/low/increasing/decreasing). This has misled entire fields (see all of George Bonnano's work on resilience, for example). psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/201...

Our paper "A fragmented field" has just been accepted at AMPPS. We find it's not just you, psychology is really getting more confusing (construct and measure fragmentation is rising). We updated the preprint with the (substantial) revision, please check it out. osf.io/preprints/ps...

I have seen lots of higher ed talks and papers in the last 10 years convincingly demonstrating that just making some cutoff (getting into a more selective college or major, not taking remedial classes) helps the marginal student. Great to see an emerging consensus. (1/2)

For every cause, x, there is some group of people (often disproportionately people who study x) who think the effects of x are way bigger than they are. Therefore, I think we are doomed to read (or worse, make) "Yeah, but the effect of x is small" takes forever.

I investigated how often papers' significant (p < .05) results are fragile (.01 ≤ p < .05) p-values. An excess of such p-values suggests low odds of replicability. From 2004-2024, the rates of fragile p-values have gone down precipitously across every psychology discipline (!)

IN MEMORY OF LYNN FUCHS The field of special education lost a visionary and beloved leader with the passing of Lynn Fuchs on May 7, 2025. Her absence leaves a profound void—not only in our scholarly community, but in the hearts of all who had the privilege of knowing her. [ click reading below ]

In Memory of Lynn Fuchs

Email from CEC Division for Research May 12, 2025 In Memory of Lynn Fuchs The field of special education lost a visionary and beloved leader with the passing of Lynn Fuchs on May 7, 2025. Her absenc

conta.cc

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · last yr.

Does anybody have a good visualization to explain how interactions can be confounded, and why interactions require interaction controls? @urisohn.bsky.social maybe? (Asking because I have an idea, but want to check out what exists already before investing the effort)

Is there a name for the fallacy that, because things are different from each other, one cannot compare them? (If not, I propose the “apples and oranges fallacy”) @stefanschubert.bsky.social

Starting to feel like "don't look at the coefficients, just calculate whatever metric is relevant to your research question" is a highly underappreciated stats hack and also I may have to get myself a marginaleffects T-shirt.

Incredibly excited to have this finally come out! Model evaluation should be about comparisons, so we have a metric that puts comparisons in predictive performance on a common scale. I can’t make a thread about this better than @crahal.com, so I’ll let him take it away.

Charlie Rahal@crahal.com · last yr.

1/5 📄✨ITS FINALLY HERE!📄✨. After _five_ years, our new model evaluation metric — The InterModel Vigorish (IMV) — is now published (@plosone.org). Paper: bit.ly/3RlqrQH Preprint: bit.ly/41LzGjm Code: github.com/intermodelvigorish ‘What’s the vig on this action?’ (bit.ly/4hPoZ3Z). ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Surreal read of the day: a paper using USAID-funded and now terminated Demographic & Health Surveys to count the huge number of lives saved by the now frozen US PEPFAR program to fight HIV, co-authored by current US admin’s nominee to lead cuts in health research jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

HIV Development Assistance and Adult Mortality in Africa

To determine the effects of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Bendavid and coauthors conducted analyses of adult mortality using person-level data from the Demographic and He...

jamanetwork.com

After a long wait, the working paper for the Many-Economists Project: The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics. We had 146 teams perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom. What source of freedom leads to different choices and results? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

A clear and compelling read on IES. I hope policymakers pay attention to this. There is a very strong bipartisan case to be made for continuing to fund the development, evaluation, and syntheses of evaluations of educational programs.

Nicole McNeil@nicolemmcneil.bsky.social · last yr.

How IES Helps Students and Educators. theconversation.com/helping-teac...

Check out my amazing colleague, collaborator and leader of the Playful Learning Landscapes work in Orange County: news.uci.edu/2025/02/07/u...

UCI Podcast: Bringing the classroom into the community

Andres Bustamante is transforming common spaces into places of learning

news.uci.edu