The authors contend that most research in education lacks statistical power. They feel that the poor use of statistics as a tool for enhancing internal validity must be remediated. The adoption of a new convention is proposed in order to put statistical certainty into reasonable perspective. (RLV)

Adherence to the arbitrary 0.05 level of significance as a benchmark for decisions about publishing research largely accounts for the popularity of one-tailed hypothesis tests. Effect size estimates, accompanied by confidence intervals or exact two-tailed probabilities, are generally more compatible with the growing meta-analytic view of social…