What do Incoming University Students Believe About Open Science Practices in Psychology?

Abstract

Background Understanding students’ naive conceptions about the norms that guide scientific best practice is important so that teachers can adapt to students’ existing understandings. Objective We examined what incoming undergraduate students of psychology believe about reproducibility and open science practices. Method We conducted an online survey with participants who were about to start their first course in psychology at a university ( N = 239). Results When asked to indicate how a researcher should conduct her study, most students endorsed several open science practices. When asked to estimate the proportion of published psychological studies that follow various open science practices, participants’ estimates averaged near 50%. Only 18% of participants reported that they had heard the term “replication crisis.” Conclusion Despite media attention about the replication crisis, few incoming psychology students in our sample were familiar with the term. The students were nevertheless in favour of most open science practices, although they overestimated the prevalence of some of these practices in psychology. Teaching Implications Teachers of incoming psychology students should not assume pre-existing knowledge about open science or replicability.

What do incoming university students believe about open science practices in psychology?

“…Table 3 displays the means and standard deviations for each norm, counternorm, and the difference values. See Table A in the Supplemental Materials for the correlations between norm and counternorm items (Beaudry et al, 2022b).…”

“…We preregistered the exploratory nature of this study on the Open Science Framework (Beaudry, Williams, Philipp, & Kothe, 2022a). Our materials, data, and analysis script are openly available in the same project (Beaudry et al, 2022a). Ethical approval was granted by Swinburne University of Technology.…”

“…Nonetheless, participants perceived some practices as being applied relatively infrequently: For example, the mean estimate of the prevalence of HARKing, preprint sharing before publication, and open data sharing were all near 30%. See Figure A in Supplemental Materials to see the distribution for each item (Beaudry et al, 2022b). Participants perceived that the most common practice was providing enough information in written reports to permit replication without asking questions of the original researchers.…”

“…For teachers interested in systematically surveying their students' existing understanding of open science practices in psychology, our survey questions could be a useful resource (available from Beaudry et al, 2022a).…”