I'm disappointed this kind of disingenuous Gladwellese keeps making its way to the HN front page. Despite what the article claims, "pretesting" is not a thing

I'm disappointed this kind of disingenuous Gladwellese keeps making its way to the HN front page. Despite what the article claims, "pretesting" is not a thing (yet) in psychology. The whole premise of the article hinges on one unpublished study by a single research group [1], one that didn't even administer a full "prefinal" at that. The effect is intriguing and might or might not be "significant" (no way to verify oneself); but either way a single, unpublished, unreplicated study does not an "exciting development in learning science" emerging from "a variety of experiments" make, as the article pretends. But then it wouldn't make as clean a narrative, would it. [1] http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/ http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/