I can give him a little benefit of the doubt, but if he said those specific words and it wasn't a misquote then it was an extremely poor choice of words. Those

I can give him a little benefit of the doubt, but if he said those specific words and it wasn't a misquote then it was an extremely poor choice of words. Those words, in that order, are so fundamentally wrong that I cannot imagine them being correct even in additional surrounding context unless the next few words that were cutoff were "...as measured by [insert preferred methodology for effect size]" that would still be poor phrasing, implying that significance led to effect size.