Eric Loken, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Educational Psychology University of Connecticut
- Storrs CT
Professor Loken studies advanced statistical modeling with applications to large-scale educational testing.
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Education
Harvard University
Ph.D.
Developmental Psychology
2001
Harvard University
A.M.
Statistics
1997
University of Michigan
M.A.
Developmental Psychology
1994
McGill University
B.A.
Philosophy
1992
Social
Media
Media Appearances
The replication crisis is good for science
The Conversation online
2019-04-08
Science is in the midst of a crisis: A surprising fraction of published studies fail to replicate when the procedures are repeated.
The Reproducibility Project, a collaboration of 270 psychologists, has attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies, while a 2018 report examined studies published in the prestigious scholarly journals Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. These efforts find that about two-thirds of studies do replicate to some degree, but that the strength of the findings is often weaker than originally claimed.
Is this bad for science? It’s certainly uncomfortable for many scientists whose work gets undercut, and the rate of failures may currently be unacceptably high. But, as a psychologist and a statistician, I believe confronting the replication crisis is good for science as a whole.
Scientists, fishing for significance, get a meager catch
STAT online
2017-02-17
A pair of researchers argue in a recent issue of Science, the p-value may be doing more harm than good. Statistician Andrew Gelman, of Columbia University, and Eric Loken, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, say scientists have bought into a “fallacy” — that if a statistically significant result emerges from a “noisy” experiment, a.k.a. one with many variables that are difficult to account for, that result is by definition a sound one.
Articles
Measurement error and the replication crisis
Science2017
Measurement error adds noise to predictions, increases uncertainty in parameter estimates, and makes it more difficult to discover new phenomena or to distinguish among competing theories. A common view is that any study finding an effect under noisy conditions provides evidence that the underlying effect is particularly strong and robust. Yet, statistical significance conveys very little information when measurements are noisy.
The statistical crisis in science
The Best Writing on Mathematics2016
There is a growing realization that reported “statistically significant” claims in scientific publications are routinely mistaken. Researchers typically express the confidence in their hypothesis using the p-value: the probability that a result at least as extreme as what was observed would occur just from random variation, if there were really nothing going on. The value of p (for “probability”) is a way of measuring the extent to which a data set provides evidence against a so-called null hypothesis.
Effects of restriction on children’s intake differ by child temperament, food reinforcement, and parent’s chronic use of restriction Authors
Appetite2014
Parents’ use of restrictive feeding practices is counterproductive, increasing children’s intake of restricted foods and risk for excessive weight gain. The aims of this research were to replicate Fisher and Birch’s (1999b) original findings that short-term restriction increases preschool children’s (3–5 y) selection, intake, and behavioral response to restricted foods, and to identify characteristics of children who were more susceptible to the negative effects of restriction.
Human face recognition ability is specific and highly heritable
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2010
Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability.
The Effect of Twitter on College Student Engagement and Grades
Journal of Computer Assisted Learning2010
Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester‐long experimental study to determine if using Twitter – the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue – for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades.
