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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Ok, I have to ask. How exactly would one run a double-blind controlled study on whether students learn better with phonics or with holistic context-and-rainbows-based teaching?

It sounds impossible to me

???

Have teaching be done by one set of people, and literacy testing by a completely different set of people, and mix the kids up at the time of the test, so that they don't know which kid learned in which way.

You can even anonymize the tests so that the people compiling the results have no idea which kid even wrote the test.

Blinding is usually a pretty trivial thing to set up.

That would be single blind, no?

Edit: maybe? Maybe not? Maybe words don't actually mean anything?

CONSORT guidelines state that [the terms single-blind, double-blind and triple-blind] should no longer be used because they are ambiguous. For instance, "double-blind" could mean that the data analysts and patients were blinded; or the patients and outcome assessors were blinded; or the patients and people offering the intervention were blinded, etc. The terms also fail to convey the information that was masked and the amount of unblinding that occurred (source)

I was wondering specifically how the people administering and receiving the treatment would be blinded. Outcome assessors could definitely be blinded - that's the part I was doubting.

Although for the record it turns out that I was wrong to doubt that, and there was a clever semi-solution for that, which was to tvir obgu gerngzragf gb obgu tebhcf, ohg va qvssrerag beqref jvgu n grfg va orgjrra. Which, as directly quoted from said study by McArthur et al, means that "it is highly likely this study used a double-blind procedure."

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