Abstract
We appreciate the thoughtful reactions of our colleagues to the “no prescriptives, please” proposal of Robinson et al. (2013), as well as the opportunity to respond to them. For the most part, our colleagues seem to agree that a problem exists in terms of unwarranted recommendations for practice appearing too often in educational research journals. At the same time, we realize that because our proposed policy is rather Draconian—in that it seeks to eliminate all recommendations for practice in all primary research journals—every responder mentioned that it was too extreme. This was intentional on our part. If, as Harris (2013) suggested, increased awareness and scrutiny become topics for further discussion among APA editors, then our modest mission will have been accomplished. In this rejoinder, we attempt to restate and clarify our proposal, along with its entailments, followed by brief comments on each responder's response.
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Notes
Although the incidence of effect size reporting has increased dramatically in education and psychology journals over the past decade, it is evident that such reporting generally occurs in an unthinking, indiscriminate fashion (Peng et al. 2013). Insofar as no randomized intervention experiment was conducted at the time and throughout the decade, it is not possible to determine exactly how much of the increase in authors' provision of effect size and confidence interval information is attributable to the manual's “encouragement” of them per se.
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Robinson, D.H., Levin, J.R. A “No Prescriptives, Please” Proposal Postscript: When Desperate Times Require Desperate Measures. Educ Psychol Rev 25, 353–359 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-013-9238-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-013-9238-y