Abstract
Scholarly disciplines vary in the degree to which their members have embraced reproducibility, and also in the availability of resources for educating new scholars in reproducible research. I will present what I hope is a framework for developing a reproducibility-focused undergraduate course that can be used by educators from a variety of disciplines. I will discuss the development, implementation, and learning outcomes assessment associated with an undergraduate capstone course I teach in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Utah. The primary goals of the course are to provide a meaningful and authentic research experience for undergraduate students, and to do so by embedding research skills development within responsible conduct of research and Open Science values and practices. In addition to promoting reproducibility, this course benefits students' research education by providing a direct—and fast—route to meaningful research questions and methods, it can be mentored "at scale" in a classroom setting, and it provides an exciting hands-on experience for students. A further benefit to providing reproducibility education to large numbers of undergraduate students is that it may promote productive skepticism and public trust in science.
Speaker Bio
Rachel Hayes-Harb, Professor of Linguistics, studies bilingual speech processing. She co-directs the Speech Acquisition Lab, where she collaborates with undergraduate and graduate student researchers, and teaches undergraduate- and graduate level-courses on language acquisition, psycholingusitics, and research methods. She directs the University of Utah Office of Undergraduate Research, which provides undergraduate research advising, education events, research grants, and professional research opportunities for undergraduate students, as well as mentor development programming for faculty. The Office is committed to leveraging the cutting-edge research of our faculty to benefit all undergraduate students through high-quality mentored research experiences.