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by sixhobbits·8y ago·view on hn ↗
Studies which divide people into two groups and do "$THING_WITH_LIKELY_POSITIVE_EFFECT" on one group and nothing on the other group are not very interesting or convincing IMO.

Normally, unless done really badly, initiatives like the one described here will have a significant positive effect.

More interesting studies follow the pattern of comparing different potential initiatives, or even better, comparing a surprising initiative with an obvious one. E.g. some studies have indicated that giving school children chess coaching improves their maths scores more than extra maths lessons.

That said, I'm hugely grateful to my parents for being very involved in reading aloud and telling stories while I was young. I'm convinced without the results of this study that there was a huge positive effect.

3 comments
Would be nice to have a study on giving agenda-free positive undivided attention as a baseline and then variations with different activities.
Agreed. Kids need unstructured time too!
what? studies with control groups aren't interesting or convincing?

this seems like a long-winded way of saying "obviously this was true", which is a ridiculous attitude towards science (social science in particular)

I suppose the point is that a study comparing reading to nothing can demonstrate that one particular type of parental attention is more useful than lack of attention, but can’t conclusively show that there’s something special about reading aloud per se. Maybe just talking, or building with blocks, or kicking a ball back and forth, or digging in the dirt, or just doing whatever the kid wants to do but together, .... would accomplish as much, or maybe reading aloud has some unique benefit, but such a study can’t distinguish those.

Edit: but actually looking at the article under discussion here, the intervention seems to be videotaping parents playing and reading with their kids and then showing them back the videotape and talking about it. So maybe what is most needed here is more explicit external feedback to the parents, rather than any specific schedule for the kids.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2018/04/...

This study also claims to have shown a dosage effect.