Are Parachutes Effective?

I was cleaning up some of my files and came across a 2003 article in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) I forgot about. It's a brilliant satire of randomized experiment dogmatism.

You can find the article here: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/327/7429/1459

Here's the conclusion:

As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.

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Smith G. C., Pell J. P. (2003). Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials, BMJ 327:1459-1461.

The Art of Science

Social science research is often criticized for not being as rigorous as "real" scientific research and there is a strong call, particularly in education, for "scientific-based" decisions and programs. The general perception is that practitioners in fields like medicine make decisions driven by scientific evidence while practitioners in fields like education make decisions driven by personal and anecdotal experience.

So when I heard my brother's medical school graduating class recite the Hippocratic oath a few weeks back I was somewhat surprised. The oath contains multiple references to practicing the "art" of medicine but no reference to the "science."

A Case Study of Causal Inference for Multilevel Observational Data

To evaluate the effect of retaining students in kindergarten instead of promoting them to first grade Hong & Raudenbush (2005, 2006) use a methodology that incorporates principal stratification, propensity scores, and hierarchical modeling.

I imagine a similar methodology is the way to go to evaluate the effect of placing students in pre-algebra instead of algebra 1. If only I could understand what it means.

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Hong, G. & Raudenbush, S. W. (2005). Effects of kindergarten retention policy on children’s cognitive growth in reading and mathematics. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 27 (3), 205-224.

Hong, G. & Raudenbush, S. W. (2005). Evaluating kindergarten retention policy: A cause study of causal inference for multilevel observational data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 101, 901-910.