There are also at least two ways to view an odds ratio of 1.95
for the risk of failing a STEM course:
i) If the experiments analyzed here had been conducted as randomized
controlled trials of medical interventions, they may
have been stopped for benefit—meaning that enrolling
patients in the control condition might be discontinued because
the treatment being tested was clearly more beneficial.
For example, a recent analysis of 143 randomized controlled
medical trials that were stopped for benefit found that they
had a median relative risk of 0.52, with a range of 0.22 to 0.66
(15). In addition, best-practice directives suggest that data
management committees may allow such studies to stop for
benefit if interim analyses have large sample sizes and P values
under 0.001 (16). Both criteria were met for failure rates
in the education studies we analyzed: The average relative
risk was 0.64 and the P value on the overall odds ratio
was