Drew Bailey

New paper: Morocco's Pioneer Middle Schools—a government-led whole-school reform—improved socioemotional skills, tripled year-on-year learning, reduced dropout ~1/3. "Beyond Basics" w/ Campos Quintero, El Amrani Mida, Glewwe, Kumar, and Lépine de-barros.com/publication/... @cega-uc.bsky.social

Don’t Do Difference In Differences (DDDID), cheers, guido

Excited to share a new paper with @jfischman, just accepted at JEL. We argue that empirical research tends to be biased and overconfident due to a weakness in the dominant econometric framework: insufficient attention paid to humans “in the loop” with the research process. 1/

📢 #EdWorkingPapers: Tyler Watts, @emmarosehart.bsky.social, & @drewhalbailey.bsky.social analyze 87 RCTs & find that fadeout is common across most programs. Intervention characteristics explain only a small share of differences in persistence. 📄 bit.ly/4aGrXY4

Why do educational intervention impacts fade? Isn't catch-up a good thing? Are sleeper effects real? Does fadeout mean failure? @drewhalbailey.bsky.social, Tyler Watts, and I address these questions & more in an EdNext piece & 4 new working papers! www.educationnext.org/why-do-most-...

Replying to @bwroberts.bsky.social on cross-lagged panel models open.substack.com/pub/drewhalb...

Person at talk translating all model descriptions into formal equations is the academic talk version of the person filling out the scorecard at a baseball game.

This fetid landmark, this historical stain on humanity is primarily due to the stunningly reckless obliteration of America's foreign assistance agency earlier this year. Led by the richest man on earth. In secret, on a weekend. With zero analysis or discussion of its catastrophic impacts.

Fadeout of cognitive training remains one of the more replicable findings in psychology in this preregistered study of 300 preschool children. Well-done study with a 4 year follow up. The language gains either faded or the control group caught up. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Interested in models used to estimate lagged effects in panel data? We (@rebiweidmann.bsky.social, Hyewon Yang) have a new paper looking at patterns of stability and their implications for bias and model choice: osf.io/preprints/ps... [1/x]

Collider effect in the real world!

About 2/3 of the posts on this platform linking to the recent NYT article on null findings from Baby’s First Years have this reaction. You can search the headline and verify yourself! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

I used Paige’s first book in a class students with a wide range of previous exposure to and attitudes about behavior genetics, and they all seem to find it very interesting. Will probably try this one too!

Random Intercepts and Slopes in Longitudinal Models: When Are They "Good" and "Bad" Controls? or Illusory Traits 2: Revenge of the Slopes Led by Siling Guo, with Nicolas Hübner, Steffen Zitzmann, Martin Hecht, and Kou Murayama. Comments welcome! osf.io/preprints/ps...

New blog post! Let's say you've measured two variables repeatedly and want to investigate how one affects the other over time. Here are some recommendations for how to do that well. www.the100.ci/2025/06/25/r...

6) LCGAs never replicate across datasets or in the same dataset. They usually just produce the salsa pattern (Hi/med/low) or the cats cradle (Hi/low/increasing/decreasing). This has misled entire fields (see all of George Bonnano's work on resilience, for example). psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/201...

Our paper "A fragmented field" has just been accepted at AMPPS. We find it's not just you, psychology is really getting more confusing (construct and measure fragmentation is rising). We updated the preprint with the (substantial) revision, please check it out. osf.io/preprints/ps...

For every cause, x, there is some group of people (often disproportionately people who study x) who think the effects of x are way bigger than they are. Therefore, I think we are doomed to read (or worse, make) "Yeah, but the effect of x is small" takes forever.

I investigated how often papers' significant (p < .05) results are fragile (.01 ≤ p < .05) p-values. An excess of such p-values suggests low odds of replicability. From 2004-2024, the rates of fragile p-values have gone down precipitously across every psychology discipline (!)

IN MEMORY OF LYNN FUCHS The field of special education lost a visionary and beloved leader with the passing of Lynn Fuchs on May 7, 2025. Her absence leaves a profound void—not only in our scholarly community, but in the hearts of all who had the privilege of knowing her. [ click reading below ]

Thanks to everybody who chimed in! I arrived at the conclusion that (1) there's a lot of interesting stuff about interactions and (2) the figure I was looking for does not exist. So, I made it myself! Here's a simple illustration of how to control for confounding in interactions:>

Is there a name for the fallacy that, because things are different from each other, one cannot compare them? (If not, I propose the “apples and oranges fallacy”) @stefanschubert.bsky.social

Starting to feel like "don't look at the coefficients, just calculate whatever metric is relevant to your research question" is a highly underappreciated stats hack and also I may have to get myself a marginaleffects T-shirt.

Incredibly excited to have this finally come out! Model evaluation should be about comparisons, so we have a metric that puts comparisons in predictive performance on a common scale. I can’t make a thread about this better than @crahal.com, so I’ll let him take it away.

Surreal read of the day: a paper using USAID-funded and now terminated Demographic & Health Surveys to count the huge number of lives saved by the now frozen US PEPFAR program to fight HIV, co-authored by current US admin’s nominee to lead cuts in health research jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

After a long wait, the working paper for the Many-Economists Project: The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics. We had 146 teams perform the same research three times, each time with less freedom. What source of freedom leads to different choices and results? papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

A clear and compelling read on IES. I hope policymakers pay attention to this. There is a very strong bipartisan case to be made for continuing to fund the development, evaluation, and syntheses of evaluations of educational programs.

Check out my amazing colleague, collaborator and leader of the Playful Learning Landscapes work in Orange County: news.uci.edu/2025/02/07/u...

New essay on NIH and indirect costs: goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-c...

Free million dollar idea: food truck that sells mapo tofu and cornbread.

Cool new review from @drewhalbailey.bsky.social that’s well worth the read! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Do you know a US-based researcher who wants to update their meta-analysis skills? #MATI2025 is accepting applications for our one-week training workshop in Chicago from July 28th – August 1st. Apply by March 2nd: www.meta-analysis-training-institute.com/application-...

As I am now handling papers at AEJ:Policy again, I want to encourage authors of papers that identify partial equilibrium effects to consider (in a rigorous manner) how they relate to policy effects or general equilibrium effects.

"A study of federally funded research projects in the United States estimated that principal investigators spend on average about 45% of their time on administrative activities related to applying for and managing projects rather than conducting active research" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Academics, let's make 2025 the year where we are more explicit and honest about our causal aims and interpretations Using, for instance, the terms "risk factor" or "associated with a decrease in" is not a clever way to avoid the issue

Overpromising on results to get a program running is ubiquitous but backfires in the long run. Figuring out how to best communicate the need for good programs and evaluations despite unrealistic views of what a worthwhile program is likely to accomplish is an important area for further work.

Please repost! We are hiring an assistant professor (W1) of Educational Psychology. We are looking forward to working with you!! uni-tuebingen.de/en/faculties...

Policymakers adjust their views of policy effectiveness when an experiment shows disappointing results but also show reduced demand for experiments. Also in response, the public supports experiments but reduces trust in the implementing institutions www.nber.org/papers/w33239

Do you need educational and psychological item response data to do your research? The IRW has 600 item response datasets (more coming!), distributed in a standardized format and ready for analysis.

Our new review, with Tyler Watts, Emma Hart, and April Yu, summarizing some work in the past few years on "Learning about Development from Interventions" is published open access at Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. Comments, questions, insults welcome. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Good writing advice from an excellent academic writer.

Adam writes about a recent study on the effects of HEPA filters on acute respiratory infections:

I had a rough year, super busy with my private matter. Now I'm slowly back. It seems many moved here and it's my first post! We published a new paper on cross-lagged panel models and causal inference in Psych. Methods (OA). We give guidance for applied researchers. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Here’s a share link for my overview of the effects of environment on three types of spatial thinking using the experience expectant vs dependent lens. Lots of gaps remain! nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...