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Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research

BACKGROUND: Mainstream psychology is experiencing a crisis of confidence. Many of the methodological solutions offered in response have focused largely on statistical alternatives to null hypothesis statistical testing, ignoring nonstatistical remedies that are readily available within psychology; n...

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Autor principal: Imam, Abdulrazaq A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9685964/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36419180
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-022-00982-7
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author Imam, Abdulrazaq A.
author_facet Imam, Abdulrazaq A.
author_sort Imam, Abdulrazaq A.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Mainstream psychology is experiencing a crisis of confidence. Many of the methodological solutions offered in response have focused largely on statistical alternatives to null hypothesis statistical testing, ignoring nonstatistical remedies that are readily available within psychology; namely, use of small-N designs. In fact, many classic memory studies that have passed the test of replicability used them. That methodological legacy warranted a retrospective look at nonexperimental data to explore the generality of the reported effects. METHOD: Various classroom demonstrations were conducted over multiple semesters in introductory psychology courses with typical, mostly freshman students from a predominantly white private Catholic university in the US Midwest based on classic memory experiments on immediate memory span, chunking, and depth of processing. RESULTS: Students tended to remember 7 ± 2 digits, remembered more digits of π following an attached meaningful story, and remembered more words after elaborative rehearsal than after maintenance rehearsal. These results amount to replications under uncontrolled classroom environments of the classic experiments originally conducted largely outside of null hypothesis statistical testing frameworks. CONCLUSIONS: In light of the ongoing replication crisis in psychology, the results are remarkable and noteworthy, validating these historically important psychological findings. They are testament to the reliability of reproducible effects as the hallmark of empirical findings in science and suggest an alternative approach to commonly proffered solutions to the replication crisis.
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spelling pubmed-96859642022-11-25 Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research Imam, Abdulrazaq A. BMC Psychol Research Article BACKGROUND: Mainstream psychology is experiencing a crisis of confidence. Many of the methodological solutions offered in response have focused largely on statistical alternatives to null hypothesis statistical testing, ignoring nonstatistical remedies that are readily available within psychology; namely, use of small-N designs. In fact, many classic memory studies that have passed the test of replicability used them. That methodological legacy warranted a retrospective look at nonexperimental data to explore the generality of the reported effects. METHOD: Various classroom demonstrations were conducted over multiple semesters in introductory psychology courses with typical, mostly freshman students from a predominantly white private Catholic university in the US Midwest based on classic memory experiments on immediate memory span, chunking, and depth of processing. RESULTS: Students tended to remember 7 ± 2 digits, remembered more digits of π following an attached meaningful story, and remembered more words after elaborative rehearsal than after maintenance rehearsal. These results amount to replications under uncontrolled classroom environments of the classic experiments originally conducted largely outside of null hypothesis statistical testing frameworks. CONCLUSIONS: In light of the ongoing replication crisis in psychology, the results are remarkable and noteworthy, validating these historically important psychological findings. They are testament to the reliability of reproducible effects as the hallmark of empirical findings in science and suggest an alternative approach to commonly proffered solutions to the replication crisis. BioMed Central 2022-11-22 /pmc/articles/PMC9685964/ /pubmed/36419180 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-022-00982-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Imam, Abdulrazaq A.
Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research
title Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research
title_full Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research
title_fullStr Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research
title_full_unstemmed Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research
title_short Remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-N research
title_sort remarkably reproducible psychological (memory) phenomena in the classroom: some evidence for generality from small-n research
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9685964/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36419180
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40359-022-00982-7
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