Reynolds, D., Hattan, C., & Markham, M. (2025)
Fair or foul? Interrogating the role of baseball knowledge in studies of knowledge and comprehension
Reading Research Quarterly 60(1), e575 · 10.1002/rrq.575
The review identifies restricted knowledge measures and comprehension texts in baseball studies, warranting caution about generalizing to curricular knowledge; it does not isolate a lexical causal mechanism or deny that knowledge matters.
Used in Dossier 1
This critic is attached to the exact objection and inference it challenges, not merely to the topic.
D1 · O1 — The baseball construct is narrower than the curricular construct · targets A4 I3
Source provenance
primaryFair or foul? Interrogating the role of baseball knowledge in studies of knowledge and comprehension
full text readFull publisher HTML read 2026-09-06, introduction through conclusion including methods and Tables 1–4. First online 2024-09-05; publisher records an Alexander-citation correction on 2024-09-13. Methods RQ2, Table 2, Analyzing Specificity/Table 3, and Internal and External Validity Tradeoffs support construct and generalization cautions, not an isolated lexical causal explanation.
abstract onlyBibliographic record and abstract-level material were reviewed; the full companion article was not read.
Primary targets: P01 P02
Availability: open access · full text read
Full publisher HTML read 2026-09-06, introduction through conclusion including methods and Tables 1–4. First online 2024-09-05; publisher records an Alexander-citation correction on 2024-09-13. Methods RQ2, Table 2, Analyzing Specificity/Table 3, and Internal and External Validity Tradeoffs support construct and generalization cautions, not an isolated lexical causal explanation.
Registry verification: no
Availability: open access · full text read
Full publisher HTML read 2026-09-06, introduction through conclusion including methods and Tables 1–4. First online 2024-09-05; publisher records an Alexander-citation correction on 2024-09-13. Methods RQ2, Table 2, Analyzing Specificity/Table 3, and Internal and External Validity Tradeoffs support construct and generalization cautions, not an isolated lexical causal explanation.
Registry verification: no
Positions (2)
The baseball measures and comprehension texts provide a restricted test of the knowledge–comprehension relationship; extending those findings to broad curricular knowledge requires additional evidence.
“these results may not generalize to school texts”
Hirsch's response — not found
None -- the work postdates the corpus. Closest recorded objection is kd:ch2_OBJ8, whose reply presupposes exactly the knowledge/vocabulary distinction Reynolds argues the experiments failed to draw.
The companion paper argues the baseball-knowledge proxy is gender-loaded, so knowledge-driven comprehension differences in the classic studies may be confounded with the gender composition of the sample.
“the proxy is gender-loaded”
Hirsch's response — not found
none found in ten books