Fair or Foul? Interrogating the Role of Baseball Knowledge in Studies of Knowledge and Comprehension
Across ages Explicit teaching and knowledge building Reading and writing
Links to claims
Limits (1)
| Claim | Basis |
|---|---|
| C17 | Review of 19 baseball studies: Recht & Leslie's groups were selected, not randomised, and split by sex; its knowledge test was 85% vocabulary with 15 of 39 items in the passage; the passage had almost no connectives. No counter-result (Bounds correction 2026-10-30). |
Review state: first-pass draft, pending human review.
Source note
Syntes: Reynolds, Hattan & Markham (2024) — a critical review of the "baseball studies" of knowledge and comprehension
Källa: Reynolds, D.; Hattan, C.; Markham, M. (2024 online; 2025). Fair or Foul? Interrogating the Role of Baseball Knowledge in Studies of Knowledge and Comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly 60(1), e575. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.575 (CC BY-NC-ND)
Verified content
- [full text] Systematic review of 19 studies (1978–2018) that used baseball knowledge as a proxy for prior knowledge in reading comprehension; 8 knowledge measures, 151 items, 75% of them vocabulary items; none of the measures reported validity evidence.
- [full text] Recht & Leslie 1988: 39-item knowledge test, 85% vocabulary; only 15 items (38%) referenced in the passage (Table 2; pp. 13–14). The good-reader/low-knowledge cell had 3 boys and 13 girls; the poor-reader/high-knowledge cell 12 boys and 4 girls (p. 8, quoting the original).
- [full text] The half-inning passage (from Chiesi et al. 1979): Coh-Metrix connectivity at the 0th percentile, syntactic simplicity 97th, Flesch–Kincaid grade 4.36 (Table 3) — a "deceptively simple" text with almost no connectives.
- [full text] The authors read the baseball findings as about domain knowledge rather than topic knowledge and caution against generalising them to school texts.
Limits
- [assessment] No outcome data of its own; a critique of measures, texts and sampling, not a counter-result. It cannot test C17's kill line (no result where strong readers without knowledge beat weak readers with it).
Why it is in the library
Used 2026-10-30 (nightly attacks) as a Bounds correction on C17: limits on the Recht & Leslie 1988 evidence, and the correction of that study's design label from "RCT" to selected groups. Open question 18.
Added 2026-10-30 by the project. [full text] = read in the full text (PDF supplied by Jonatan; private).
Metadata as recorded
- ID
- KNOW-010
- Tier
- review
- Titel
- Fair or Foul? Interrogating the Role of Baseball Knowledge in Studies of Knowledge and Comprehension
- Författare
- Dan Reynolds; Courtney Hattan; Marissa Markham
- År
- 2024 (online); Reading Research Quarterly 60(1), 2025, e575
- Källa/DOI
- DOI 10.1002/rrq.575
- URL
- https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.575
- Licens
- CC BY-NC-ND (stated on p. 1)
- Typ
- systematic review of 19 "baseball studies" (1978–2018) — measures, texts and citation patterns; no new outcome data
- Åldersgrupp
- overgripande
- Teman
- explicit-undervisning-kunskap;lasning-och-skrivande
- Hämtad
- 2026-10-29 (supplied by Jonatan); text extracted 2026-10-30
- Status
- in the library since 2026-10-30 (nightly attacks; C17 Bounds correction). The PDF Jonatan supplied is filed privately in this folder; never published.
The original files (PDF or abstract) are kept in the project archive and are not published here.