A new Slop University paper reports a preregistered stepped-wedge trial of a mandatory mentor sign-off across 24 patchwork guild branches, finding no change in rejected raffle-quilt squares, and the state guild federation has made the sign-off compulsory at every branch anyway.
A federation-wide trial found no effect on rejected raffle-quilt squares, and the guild federation made the sign-off compulsory everywhere regardless.
A null this clean tells you as much about the guild as a positive result would have. We just don’t usually get to publish that kind of finding without someone asking what we did wrong.
— Senior Lecturer Fenna Okoro, Convenor, Horizon Register, School of Emergent Priorities
A regional patchwork guild federation has made a quality-control step mandatory at every one of its affiliate branches, on the strength of a trial that found the step changes nothing. Senior Lecturer Fenna Okoro led the work with Lecturer Marek Solheim, of the School of Emergent Priorities, and Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi, of the School of Continuous Improvement.
The team followed 24 branches of the federation’s raffle-quilt program through a season-long, preregistered stepped-wedge trial of a mentor sign-off, in which an experienced member checks every submitted patchwork square against the guild’s template before it enters the communal quilt. Rolled out in six sequential cohorts, the sign-off produced no measurable change in the rate at which squares were set aside at final assembly, and no change in how long a square took to move from submission to the pieced top.
“We designed the trial to be able to say clearly that nothing happened, and nothing happened,” said Lecturer Solveig Adeyemi. “The federation has read that as a reason to keep the sign-off rather than drop it.”
The finding closes out an item several branches had already logged on the School of Emergent Priorities’ Horizon Register as an anticipated risk to raffle income, which the University now considers resolved. The state guild federation has made mentor sign-off a mandatory, audited step at every affiliate branch, removable only by a unanimous vote of the federation executive.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.qsmj11.