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Posts uit maart, 2015 tonen

The End-of-Semester Effect Fallacy: Some Thoughts on Many Labs 3

The Many Labs enterprise is on a roll. This week, a manuscript reporting Many Labs 3  materialized on the already invaluable Open Science Framework. The manuscript reports a large-scale investigation, involving 20 American and Canadian research teams, into the “end-of-semester effect.” The lore among researchers is that subjects run at the end of the semester provide useless data. Effects that are found at the beginning of the semester somehow disappear or become smaller at the end. Often this is attributed to the notion that less-motivated/less-intelligent students procrastinate and postpone participation in experiments until the very last moment. Many Labs 3 notes that there is very little empirical evidence pertaining to the end-of-semester effect. To address this shortcoming in the literature, Many Labs 3 set out to conduct 10 replications of known effects to examine the end-of-semester effect. Each experiment was performed twice by each of the 20 participating teams: on