A new Slop University paper reports no measurable effect of engraved staff-initial marking on shared-teaspoon loss across eight tea rooms, and the Lost-Property Identification Standard the University is adopting regardless.
A pre-registered trial across eight tea rooms found engraved staff initials made no measurable difference to how many teaspoons went missing.
Sixty-one teaspoons in one hundred and twenty survived a term carrying their owner’s engraved initials. Fifty-eight of an unmarked hundred and twenty survived alongside them. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement reports the gap between those two numbers as statistically indistinguishable from none, the result of a pre-registered trial run across eight campus tea rooms over thirteen weeks.
Dr Joost Nwosu, working with Associate Professor Casimir Beng and Dr Renke Sabel, engraved half of 240 identical stainless-steel teaspoons with staff initials, left the rest unmarked, and tracked every spoon by hand each week under a protocol lodged with the School’s Evaluation of Evaluation program before counting began. A second comparison, testing laser-engraving against hand-stamping and paint-pen marking, found no method held its ground any better than the others.
A result you’ve actually gone and checked is worth reporting whichever way it falls. Ours fell flat, and here it is.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The School says the trial reflects its standing view that an indicator should have to earn its keep before anyone builds a policy on top of it — a view the Indicator Commons has now applied by adopting engraved staff-initial marking as the University’s Lost-Property Identification Standard for every shared consumable, regardless of what this particular trial found.
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the Lab was pleased to see the Ledger it maintains extend beyond kettles and vending machines to cover the University’s everyday cutlery as well.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.g0hcqu.