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Sherman Dorn
Reasoning about and interpreting effect sizes: How big are they, really?
Half a century ago, educational psychologist Gene Glass coined a term for research synthesis, meta-analysis: “the term is a bit grand, but it is precise” (Glass, 1976, p. 3). Glass and Mary Lee Smith had wondered how to combine different studies about the effectiveness of behavioral and talk therapy, and decided that one way to […]
Witch hunt for words
Note: this first appeared as a column in the Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) January 8, 2026. When the Arizona Board of Education voted December 8 to remove anything smacking of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from our Structured English Immersion curriculum and the Arizona Professional Teaching Standards, they were succumbing to this year’s witchhunt for words. […]
When others channel the Borg, look for the bagmen and the Borgias
Inevitability is a common rhetorical ploy in education. To Thomas Edison, film would inevitably replace textbooks. In the 1960s, B.F. Skinner said that teaching machines were inevitably going to replace teachers. In 2012, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were inevitably going to take over higher education. Pick your initiative, and you can almost always find someone […]
Arizona State University and Trump
On November 26, Arizona State University featured in a Wall Street Journal article written by Elizabeth Collins, one of their national political reporters based in Phoenix, and Douglas Belkin, a Journal higher ed reporter. This was not the first time my university employer has been prominently mentioned in a Journal article in 2025: On June 20, President Michael Crow’s op-ed argued for […]
Repertoire
On one of the social media platforms I visit, there was a set of threads recently on the science of reading and three-cuing, a now-disdained prompt for early readers having difficulty with a word. As I understand it, three-cuing is a set of three prompts to guess the word. I’m not a fan of encouraging […]