Comment on “Increasing chemistry students’ knowledge, confidence, and conceptual understanding of pH using a collaborative computer pH simulation” by S. W. Watson, A. V. Dubrovskiy and M. L. Peters, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 2020, 21, 528

摘要

This comment discusses some issues about the use and reporting of experimental studies in education, illustrated by a recently published study that claimed (i) that an educational innovation was effective despite outcomes not reaching statistical significance, and (ii) that this refuted the findings of an earlier study. The two key issues raised concern how the research community should understand the concept of refutation when comparing across studies, and whether the adoption of inferential statistics in a study should bind researchers to accept the inferences such tests suggest.