James_Miller comments on N-back news: Jaeggi 2011, or, is there a psychologist/statistician in the house?

James_Miller 17 Jun 2011 3:19 UTC
3 points
From the study:

Because we included children from both the Detroit and Ann Arbor metropolitan areas, we had a broad range of socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity

Detroit has some of the worse public schools in the country and Ann Arbor some of the best. Yet, unless I missed it Jaeggi didn’t breakdown any of the results by school location. Strange. I wonder which type of students were among those that she claimed benefited from the N-back?
- gwern 17 Jun 2011 18:54 UTC
  4 points
  Parent
  Table 1′s caption includes the line:
  
  There were no significant group differences on any of the pretest measures or the demographic variables.
  
  So presumably they didn’t notice any correlations between the obvious demographic variables and performance.
  - James_Miller 17 Jun 2011 20:13 UTC
    0 points
    Parent
    Thanks, you’re right.
- Nic_Smith 17 Jun 2011 7:38 UTC
  0 points
  Parent
  That so closely resembles the old saw about econometrics hunting that I can’t believe someone would actually do that...