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Teaching Good, Open Science by Conducting Close Replications in the Classroom

The past few years has witnessed much debate regarding research practices that can potentially undermine the accuracy of reported research findings (e.g., Questionable Research Practices, or QRPs). A strong case can be made that, for example, that the Type I error rate is in fact much higher than the nominal α level of .05 because of study design and data analytic flexibility. Combined with the typically low levels of statistical power (~50%) in the published research, and the fact that over 90% of published findings are reported as statistically significant, a non-trivial number of published research findings are false-positives. But which ones? The most effective way to reliably distinguish true positives is to conduct high quality close replications of published research in order to derive more precise effect size estimates for presumed effects. Different types of replication (e.g., very near to very far) are also needed to test and advance theory. To encourage replication research in young scholars, as well as to teach open science practices, I have developed a graduate course on research methods in social psychology that implements a hands-on replication project from an open-science perspective (syllabus available online: https://osf.io/nxytf/).