Extending openness to scholarship and research in education

There is a substantial shift underway in how quantitative research is being planned and executed. Emerging from the apparent replication crisis in psychological science, the Open Science movement is now spreading across disciplines (Munafò et al., 2017). The Open Science movement is a collective of researchers devoted to open and transparent practices in the conduct and dissemination of research (Nosek et al., 2015). These practices include pre-registration of studies, open and transparent methods and data and open publication practices. While there has been much emphasis on open educational resources, there has not been as much discussion about open scholarship and research. To date, there has been little attention paid to the implications of this movement in education broadly (Alhadad, Searston, & Lodge, 2018). Through a comparison with open educational practices, we explore the potential of Open Science for helping to translate research for use in design and teaching practice. Some aspects of Open Science lend themselves well to the enhancement of the relationship between research and practice in education, while others are more challenging. For research in educational psychology and the learning sciences, the implications of the Open Science movement are relatively clear, for wider educational research, the implications are still some way from becoming apparent. Our aim in this presentation is to provide a foundation for further discussion about how more open and transparent research practices might help to enhance research in education. We suggest that this stronger foundation will then allow for more effective, evidence-informed decision-making for the design and delivery of education.




References

Alhadad, S. S. J., Searston, R. & Lodge, J. M. (2018). Interdisciplinary Open Science: What are the implications for educational technology research? ASCILITE Conference 2018.

Munafò, M. R., Nosek, B. A., Bishop, D. V., Button, K. S., Chambers, C. D., du Sert, N. P., . . . Ioannidis, J. P. (2017). A manifesto for reproducible science. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, Article 0021. doi:10.1038/s41562-016-0021

Nosek, B. A., Alter, G., Banks, G. C., Borsboom, D. Bowman, S. D., Breckler, S. J., … Yarkoni, T. (2015). Promoting an open research culture. Science 348,1422–1425. doi:10.1126/science.aab2374