When it comes to research, educators need to be wise consumers … and bogus or flawed research studies are not the only problem. A longitudinal study from John Hopkins University (Wolf, Morrison, Slavin & Risman, 2019) found that “insider research” shows seventy percent more benefits to students than independent research.
This emphasizes the importance of due diligence in determining the source of a research study. Not only can this save you embarrassment down the road, but it could also keep you from wasting enormous amounts of time and money implementing popular but ineffective programs.
Reference: Wolf, R., Morrison, J., Slavin, R., & Risman, K. (2019). Do Developer Commissioned Evaluations Inflate Impact Sizes?. Retrieved from https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/developer-abstract.pdf