The dark side of education research: widespread bias

Johns Hopkins study finds that insider research shows 70 percent more benefits to students than independent research

https://hechingerreport.org/the-dark-side-of-education-research-widespread-bias/

The study, “Do Developer-Commissioned Evaluations Inflate Effect Sizes?”

There are a number of reasons for why developer studies tend to show stronger results, according to Wolf, whose full time work is to evaluate educational programs. The first is that a company is unlikely to publish unfavorable results. Wolf speculates that developers are more likely to “brand a failed trial a ‘pilot’ and file it away.”

This isn’t the first study to detect bias in education research. The problem of hiding unfavorable results from publication was documented as far back as 1995. In 2016, one of Wolf’s co-authors, Robert Slavin, wrote about the positive results that researchers get when they devise their own measures to prove that their inventions work.