APA: How to Teach Replicability

In recent years, psychology, like many areas of science, has faced a credibility problem, as scientists and the public have realized that many common research practices can lead to a literature that includes questionable or nonreproducible findings. What has come out of these discussions are a set of practices—­including preregistering studies and sharing one’s materials and data with other scientists—designed to make research more transparent and replicable (see "Ways to embrace transparency").

These open science practices may be new, but for many students, they seem intuitively appealing. “My undergraduates believe research transparency is the way science has always been done,” says Morton Ann Gernsbacher, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who gave a workshop on teaching research transparency at APA 2019 in Chicago. It’s important to reinforce those beliefs early, she says, because for open science practices to become mainstream, they need to be taught to the next generation of psychologists and other scientists. Psychology faculty share their advice on how to integrate open science into teaching and mentoring.

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