Thinking of running an RCT in postsecondary education? MDRC has created a fantastic set of resources to help you in projecting minimum effect sizes, randomizing, and processing data Proud to have helped advise this project! www.mdrc.org/the-rct

Madison, Wisconsin — 2026

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

More of this type of careful meta-research, please. #SystematicReview #MetaAnalysis

Groundhog Harassed By Dipshits In Stupid Hats

Evidence synthesis folks, I have a social sciences research team that wants to include scoping reviews (as well as the usual systematic reviews) in an umbrella review. What do you think about that?

Glad to see this work by #sanfordstudent published on the problems of translating effect sizes in educational research into months/years of learning. People assume the same annual growth (in a grade) on any test when it actually differs quite a lot across tests. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. (Not that) Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

Do I have any #rstats or #Stan or #brms buddies who have an example of how to write a custom family for brms that involves a multivariate outcome (in my case, a set of sufficient statistics for a discrete time markov chain)?

WANTED! Collaborators for a Big Team Science Systematic Review on Statistical Software in #StatsEd, led by @alyssacounsell.bsky.social (RoSE Statistics Software SIG Lead), @maddipow.bsky.social (@forrt.bsky.social rt.bsky.social Director of Education & Pedagogy), & @richharrisleeds.bsky.social. 1/2

Coming up in 1 hour (11 am CST)...

Anyone on here have experience with Springer's ResearchSquare preprint service? I have two different papers under review where the preprints are shared through this. There's some nice features to it but I'm starting to discover there's some other quite questionable aspects to its design.

Just got an email from Web of Science that an article I reviewed had been published in the journal. That's funny, I thought, I still owe the journal my review of the revised version. Did the editor accept the paper without my review? (And can I scratch it off my to-do list?) Turns out, no...

Here's your utterly inconsequential statistics trivia question for the day. (I ask because I don't know but would like to find appropriate keywords.) Complete the analogies: L1 loss : Laplace distribution as L2 loss : Gaussian distribution as L3 loss : ??? as L4 loss : ???

As co-chair of AERA's @srma-sig.bsky.social, I am pleased to announce our Fall 2025 webinar series focused on meta-analysis and systematic reviews! On Friday (Oct 3), our first webinar will be given by James Pustejovsky @jepusto.bsky.social! 🎉 Register here: us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Two open positions on COS's research team! Project Coordinator: Undergraduate degree in research, or equivalent experience ats.rippling.com/cos-careers/... Program Manager: 10 yrs of project management experience or 2+ program management ats.rippling.com/cos-careers/... Please share w/colleagues

Psychological Methods invites early-career psychologists to apply to be a 2026 Editorial Fellow. This year kicked off our EF program -- it was enriching for the EFs and rewarding for everyone involved. Let's do it again! For details: www.apa.org/pubs/journal... @apajournals.bsky.social

Everyone should really listen to this episode. One of the things I appreciate most about The War on Cars is that so much of what they discuss is applicable not just to urbanism/livable streets issues, but to broader progressive causes. A good reminder of how important it is to dismantle car culture.

Stats Q: Is there a word or succinct phrase for the discipline or humility that comes from having to use a statistical model to actually make predictions about future data?

This should get WIDE circulation: MIT stating that it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.” gizmodo.com/mit-backs-aw...

This is an insightful and timely analysis. This point in the conclusions resonated

Paper drop, for anyone interested in #metascience, #statistics, or #metaanalysis! @clintin.bsky.social and I show in a new paper in JASA that the P-curve, a popular forensic meta-analysis method, has deeply undesirable statistical properties. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 1/?

Apropos of nothing, here's James' writing advice for Friday: Starting a sentence with "Arguably,...." is basically just signaling to the reader that you're about to start bullshitting them. Try replacing with "So my garbage take is..." and see if the rest of the paragraph still works.

Motherfucking wind farms…

The Rewiring America calculator has state, local, and utility incentives for 29 states. See if there are incentives in your area! homes.rewiringamerica.org/calculator

Apropos of absolutely nothing, it seems like a fine day to learn a bit about a big-city Socialist mayor. Daniel Hoan of Milwaukee was re-elected many times, with many exemplary successes and some challenges, none of which bear any resemblance whatsoever to the present day

For researchers with limited background in statistics, we have written this gentle introduction to simulation studies (with @timpmorris.bsky.social and other people from the STRATOS initiative): bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/1...

Masters level course materials here too. I’m no simulation expert and the materials are still evolving, but maybe useful to others. github.com/ianhussey/simulation-course

A hearty congratulations to Dr. Bethany Hamilton Bhat (@bethanyhbhat.bsky.social‬) for defending her dissertation this morning! Her thesis is titled "Power Approximations for the Test of Study-Level Categorical Moderators in Meta-Regression with Dependent Effect Sizes."

Remember when MDPI used questionable practices to siphon traffic from big five publishers’ journals? Never thought I’d see the shoe on the other foot.

I love watching @lajeunesselab.bsky.social talk about meta-analysis - so inspiring. At ESMARConf2025 he explores teaching meta-analysis in a world with AI resources to help students youtu.be/vOVhHnI2Ylc?... @eshackathon.bsky.social

🆕New CONSORT & SPIRIT 2025 Guidelines Our colleagues helped shape these updates, making #ClinicalTrial reporting more transparent & useful for everyone. Key changes: ✔️More open science ✔️Better reporting of harms & missing data ✔️Greater harmonisation between guidelines More info: buff.ly/HC1rx31

Anyone have a rec for a good Algebra 1 self-study course? Looking for something to work on over the summer with a middle schooler who’s taken Alg1 but could use practice to build confidence.

Please join us next week Friday for our final seminar of the 2025 season! We are thrilled to be joined by Dr. Richard Riley (@richarddriley.bsky.social), a leading expert in individual participant data meta-analysis, to discuss the rationale, concepts, and pitfalls in conducting IPD syntheses.

📣 Current and former #USgov data scientists! Join @ropensci.org + @openscapes.bsky.social on May 6 for a community support and networking event: ropensci.org/events/datas... Co-hosted by former feds (NOAA, NASA, DOE, NSF, NIH + Federal Reserve) to discuss their paths to other sectors. #dataBS

Some good news for this Friday. This astonishing group of people have spun up ERICA, the ERIC archive. www.datarescueproject.org/erica-to-the... #GLAMS #Skybrarians #AcademicSky

📣 FREE ONLINE COURSE 👇 # Effectively Managing Research Data for FAIR, Reproducible Science In this course, you'll discover how to develop simple, clear, and compliant data management plans (DMPs) using the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles.

JOB! Please RT. Swarthmore is hiring for our Social Science Quantitative Lab Associate to support & do teaching quant methods to undergrads. Especially looking for people familiar with sociology and/or political science, and R. Apply by 4/18. apply.interfolio.com/165892 Happy to answer questions.

🚀 Join ESMARConf2025! 🚀 Submit your abstract by April 21: shorturl.at/G3LpO ESMARConf is the leading online event for evidence synthesis in R! 📅 June 11–13, 2025 📺 54K+ views across past conferences More info: esmarconf.org/events/ #ESMARConf #MetaAnalysis #Rstats #EvidenceSynthesis

Coming up on Friday!

Whelp ed research orgs had mass lay-offs yesterday Mathematica: www.linkedin.com/posts/mathem... MDRC: www.linkedin.com/posts/mdrc_t... NORC: www.linkedin.com/posts/dan-ga... RTI: www.linkedin.com/posts/no%C3%... Westat: www.linkedin.com/posts/westat... WestEd: www.linkedin.com/posts/amyhre...

The next meeting off our online seminar series is coming up in a little over a week, on Friday March 14. We are thrilled to host Dr. Chris Cipriano (@drchriscip.bsky.social) from the Yale School of Medicine to share her work developing a living systematic review on social emotional learning.

Welcome! We’ve got a pretty nice crew of evidence synthesis folks going here. Re-upping our starter pack after some more recent adds: bsky.app/profile/jepu...

It's that time of year to circulate this list of orgs for those seeking ed policy jobs/internships. Please let me know if there are opportunities/orgs I should add. Good luck out there! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Results for America invites teams from state and local education agencies to apply for no-cost, virtual 7-session learning opportunity to advance evidence-based high-impact tutoring in their schools and districts. Learn more and apply here by March 12th: results4america.org/solutions-sp...

JIC, here is an OSF Folder of the following What Works Clearinghouse materials as of February 2025: - Data from Study Reviews - Handbooks and Reviewer Resources - Intervention Reports - Practice Guides osf.io/w5aq8/

from “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler

from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents