The Chronicle has published a letter from Don Fader at Alabama. He offers a critique of some studies on class size that were summarized in an article that was published in the Chronicle. Best line:
Among other things, the studies described in this article seem to base their evaluation on student “self-reported learning outcomes.” What the heck does that mean? What students think they learned?
It’s not just learning outcomes assessment that suffers from data quality issues. Much of the research on education (and many other fields) suffers from a willingness to use, to make inferences from, and to publish based on dubious data.