Bring open science into the classroom

Science is in a state of reform. Over the past decade, difficult questions about replication, problematic research practices and the incentives that shape academic work have prompted researchers to reconsider how knowledge is produced, evaluated and shared. We have an opportunity now to build an approach to science that is fundamentally more open, transparent, rigorous and trustworthy. This shiny new vision for science has been referred to as the “open science” movement.

Many of the conversations about how to open up science began in psychology. However, the concerns, challenges and lessons are by no means unique to my discipline. Across disciplines, researchers are grappling with what good research looks like and how our structures, incentives and everyday practices might need to change to facilitate this. For this to happen, though, we need to teach students about open science explicitly and meaningfully.

• A beginner’s guide to open science
• Campus Talks: What is open access?
• Spotlight guide: how to foster an open research culture

At the University of Leeds, we have spent the past three years reforming our psychology curriculum and working to embed open science more explicitly. One thing has become increasingly clear through this work: students are remarkably well equipped to contribute to big conversations about the nature of science and knowledge. We underestimate them at our peril. Here are three examples of ways to integrate conversations about open science into the curriculum, which can be used across disciplines and contexts.

1. Talk to students about how science actually works

One of the simplest things educators can do is to have frank conversations with students about questionable research practices. Why might a researcher make analytical decisions after seeing their results? What has led to publication bias? What happens when academic systems disproportionately reward novelty, speed and statistically significant findings?

These conversations allow students to understand science as a structure that is shaped by particular incentives, norms, principles and values.

We’ve found that students are more than capable of grappling with the complexity that this introduces. In one particularly lively discussion, we asked first-year undergraduate students whether questionable research practices should be punishable and, if so, what an appropriate punishment might look like.

This quickly opened up much bigger questions. Where does responsibility sit when problematic practices are normalised within a discipline? How should we distinguish misconduct from poor training or questionable norms? Who is ultimately responsible for science?

The point is not to arrive at a neat answer. It is to invite students to recognise that they have a legitimate place in conversations about how science should operate.

2. Ask students what is at stake when science is closed

There can be a temptation when teaching open science to start with the tools: here is how to preregister; here is where to share data; here is how to make materials open. This is important, of course, but teaching the mechanics without the underlying rationale risks compartmentalising openness and losing the underpinning values.

Instead, ask students what we risk when research is not transparent. What happens when analytical decisions are invisible? Who loses out when research is inaccessible? What does it mean for public trust if findings cannot be scrutinised or reproduced? And whose knowledge is made visible through our existing systems of research and publishing?

My colleagues and I have found that such discussions reframe open science as something bigger than a collection of technical practices. We get a conversation about what kind of knowledge we want to produce and what responsibilities researchers have when producing it.

3. Build openness into what students already do

Of course, students also need opportunities to put these principles into practice. Although we did reform the whole curriculum at my university, integrating open science tools does not require wholesale redesign. Look at the research activities that students already complete and ask where openness could be meaningfully built in.

For example, we are moving towards all psychology students preregistering their dissertation research. As others have noted, preregistration gives students an opportunity to articulate their research questions and analytical decisions before knowing their results. Importantly, this can also become a pedagogical tool because it makes the decision-making process itself visible and open.

Similar small interventions can happen elsewhere in the curriculum: students can work with open datasets, examine published preregistrations alongside research papers, attempt replication studies, share analysis scripts or critically evaluate decisions about whether and how research materials should be made open.

Ultimately, embedding open science into teaching requires us to take students seriously as members of our research communities. Students are not just waiting to inherit whatever version of science we hand down to them. They can question it, scrutinise it and help us to imagine how it might be better.

Madeleine Pownall is associate professor of psychology at the University of Leeds.

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