Dr Kait Clark, lead of the Applied Cognition and Neuroscience theme of the Psychological Sciences Research Group (PSRG) is the senior author of an Registered Report in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science: “Evaluating the pedagogical effectiveness of study preregistration in the undergraduate dissertation.” The lead team includes external collaborators Dr Madeleine Pownall, Dr Charlotte Pennington, and Dr Emma Norris, and co-authors include UWE collaborators Dr Jemma Sedgmond and Dr Iris Holzleitner.
Dr Clark is UWE’s Local Network Lead for the UK Reproducibility Network, and alongside her research in cognitive neuroscience, she also conducts meta-research (research on research). She is a passionate advocate of responsible research practices, research integrity, and reproducibility and aims to instil these principles in her students; however, previous research has shown that undergraduate students often use questionable research practices in their final-year dissertations.
In the years following the recent “replication crisis” in psychology, researchers have begun to adopt open science practices to conduct more robust and reproducible research, and we are also beginning to teach these methods to our students – the researchers of the future. Preregistration (specifying hypotheses and planned analyses on a time-stamped document prior to data collection) is one open science practice used to mitigate questionable research practices, but the efficacy of preregistration as a pedagogic tool had yet to be explored empirically.
Dr Clark and her team recruited 89 UK psychology students who either did (N = 52) or did not (N = 37) preregister their undergraduate dissertation projects and measured their attitudes toward statistics and open science before and after their project completion. Although preregistration did not impact the students attitudes toward statistics or acceptance of questionable research practices, students who preregistered gained a greater understanding of open science over the course of their dissertations compared to students who did not. Students who preregistered also reported that engaging with the practice improved the clarity and organisation of their dissertations. The results contribute to the ongoing discussion of incorporating open science into the undergraduate curriculum.