A School of Continuous Improvement paper pre-registers a direct replication of an earlier calibration-index null finding inside a 34-outlet franchise, and reports the result the original site did not find.
A pre-registered replication of a calibration index's null result instead finds a relationship, inside a video-recorded franchise
A finding that fails to reproduce is common enough in science to have its own literature. A finding that fails to reproduce inside the same university that produced it is rarer, and Slop University has just published one anyway.
A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement returned to the Calibration Maturity Index, a five-step scale introduced to grade how rigorously a performance-review meeting is run, and asked whether its earlier finding — that a well-run session doesn’t actually rate anyone more accurately — held up outside the professional-services firm where it was first measured. Inside a 34-outlet quick-service franchise, whose calibration sessions are recorded for the parent company’s brand-compliance audits, the pattern reversed: better-run sessions rated people more accurately after all.
The School of Continuous Improvement counts the reversal among the more useful things a replication programme can produce: a result its own instrument-builders did not expect, and did not have to like to publish. The franchise’s national training office has already begun requiring every calibration session across its network to be filmed, citing the University’s replication as its evidence base.
An instrument that agrees with itself twice is unremarkable. Ours agreed with itself once and reversed the second time, which we think says something about instruments, and something about rooms with cameras in them.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement, School of Continuous Improvement
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fgy2ah.