A two-season randomised trial from the School of Continuous Improvement reports a null on exhibitor re-entry, alongside a widening gap between the engagement figure and the entry books.
A pre-registered trial across 46 preserves and baking classes at nine regional agricultural shows found the effect inside its equivalence margin
A protocol lodged before the first entry book was opened has come back with a result it was written to be able to report: nothing. Well Presented, Slightly Overset, published today by the School of Continuous Improvement, asked whether returning a written judge’s comment with each entry brings a show exhibitor back the following season. Across 46 competition classes at nine regional agricultural shows, assigned at random and followed for two seasons, it did not.
The University counts a finding of this shape as a contribution in its own right, and the record it joins holds few of them.
The societies gave us their entry books for two seasons and let us randomise a pavilion some of them have run for a century. There is no version of this study that happens without that, and the answer we have carried back to them is that the cards made no difference we could find.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
The paper’s second strand follows what the cards did move. Comment cards issued per class rose steadily across the programme, and the engagement-weighted projection several societies use to set the following year’s schedule rose with them, reaching 72.6 per cent for the 2025 season against an observed 60.8 in the entry books.
Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory, said the result “sits inside a longer programme the Observatory has been building on how a schedule gets set, and it is the first time we have been able to say what one of the inputs does not do.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.be6zz8.