Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
School of Languages and Translation, University of Turku, Turku, Varsinais-Suomi, Finland.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 8;17(7):e0271191. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271191. eCollection 2022.
Psychological research, including research into adult reading, is frequently based on convenience samples of undergraduate students. This practice raises concerns about the external validity of many accepted findings. The present study seeks to determine how strong this student sampling bias is in literacy and numeracy research. We use the nationally representative cross-national data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies to quantify skill differences between (i) students and the general population aged 16-65, and (ii) students and age-matched non-students aged 16-25. The median effect size for the comparison (i) of literacy scores across 32 countries was d = .56, and for comparison (ii) d = .55, which exceeds the average effect size in psychological experiments (d = .40). Numeracy comparisons (i) and (ii) showed similarly strong differences. The observed differences indicate that undergraduate students are not representative of the general population nor age-matched non-students.
心理学研究，包括成人阅读研究，经常基于大学生的便利样本。这种做法引起了人们对许多被接受的发现的外部有效性的担忧。本研究旨在确定在读写和计算能力研究中，这种学生抽样偏差有多大。我们使用具有全国代表性的成人能力国际评估计划的跨国数据，量化了（i）16-65 岁学生和一般人群，以及（ii）16-25 岁学生和年龄匹配的非学生之间的技能差异。在 32 个国家进行的读写分数比较（i）的中位数效应大小为 d =.56，而比较（ii）的 d =.55，超过了心理实验中的平均效应大小（d =.40）。读写比较（i）和（ii）也显示出类似的强烈差异。观察到的差异表明，大学生不能代表一般人群，也不能代表年龄匹配的非学生。
