So picture this: You are a behavioral science researcher at a top state university and your team has, for more than a year, been experimentally studying the efficacy of online versus in-person college education. Using an intensive and highly validated experimental methodology, studying more than 10,000 college students across more than 40 different universities, you find something that is shocking: You find that, controlling for a broad array of factors (e.g., different instructors, content areas, kinds of universities, etc.), students who are randomly assigned to the in-person-schooling condition perform worse on various objective indices of academic aptitude (such as the Graduate Record Exam) and on traditional markers of academic success (e.g., graduation rates) than participants who are randomly assigned to the online-only condition.

You and your team are, of course, dumbfounded. This pattern was definitely not consistent with your prediction based on your hypothesis.

Further, this finding is kind of threatening. You have taught exclusively in-person at this same university for more than a quarter of a century and you (along with most of your colleagues and administrators) have always believed quite genuinely and strongly in the traditional (non-online) collegiate experience. Your new results seem to fly fully in the face of that vision. Uggh!

You call a meeting with the whole research squad and, after double checking all your data carefully, you realize that there is no chance that you are mis-reading the data. You call for a full replication of the study. Over the next 18 months, your team replicates the study as carefully as possible.

When it comes time to analyze the data, the air in the room is so thick that it can be cut with a butter knife. With your full team present, you run the basic analyses and, much to the shock of you and your team, the findings from your first study replicated quite clearly: You have provided strong evidence that online education is ultimately superior* to in-person education—in spite of the fact that you predicted quite the opposite and that your entire career has been dedicated to the traditional, in-person collegiate experience.

What do you do now!?!?!?

In a recent article that I feel quite fortunate to have been part of, Clark et al. (2023) provide........

© Psychology Today