Research Reports – Part 1

Since 2010, when I started my blog, I have been told numerous times that I should read research reports. Of course, I read research reports but I don’t accept them if they don’t make sense. We should think if research reports make sense and discard those that don’t appeal to our senses.

I am reminded of what Daniel Kahneman wrote in his book ‘Thinking fast and slow’:

 

‘We are far too willing to believe research findings based on inadequate evidence and prone to collect too few observations in our own research. The goal of our study was to examine whether other researchers suffered from the same affliction. We found that our expert colleagues, like us, greatly exaggerated the likelihood that the original result of an experiment would be successfully replicated even with a small sample. They also gave very poor advice to a fictitious graduate student about the number of observations she needed to collect. Even statisticians were not good intuitive statisticians.’

When I first started researching dyslexia in 2004, at least one article per week appeared on phonological awareness deficit being the cause of dyslexia. I read many such articles for several years.

By 2010, I had taught more than 20 dyslexic kids who could all read in Malay and those who went to vernacular schools could read in Pinyin but not in English. I then started challenging the theory that phonological awareness deficit was the cause of dyslexia. I wrote incessantly until that theory was debunked in 2017.

It is not that I don’t accept research reports, I question every material I read and accept only those that make sense to me.

You may Google search my articles at LINK.