> The hypothesis that fewer toys in children’s environments would improve the quality of play, measured by three variables, was supported.
But given they only conducted a paired difference test for 4 toys and 16 toys, they can only conclude that there's a statistically significant difference between 4 and 16 toys. This is very different than saying fewer toys correlate to any result, because when one says "fewer toys correlate to X", it implies that the correlation stands for any two numbers of toys, and that's not what the study looked at.
Sure. But if we're going to go that far down the path of pedantry, why not get to the even deeper problem with that statement, which is that, strictly speaking, your alternative hypothesis is never supported; you can only fail to reject the null hypothesis.
I don't think it's that pedantic a point. IMHO, I agree this study is incremental and thus too preliminary to draw generalizing conclusions on. Even the paper itself acknowledges a number of major aspects that further research should focus on.
But consider that threads here are already drawing parallels to Montessori education, personal anecdotes, etc. People are used to big bang results and will happily draw conclusions that aligns with their world view even if the wording in a paper isn't exactly what a scientific study actually means to say.
