Open Science 2.0: Large-Scale Collaborative Education Research

Abstract

Concerns about the replication crisis and false findings have spread through a number of fields, including educational and psychological research. In some pockets, education has begun to adopt open science reforms that have proven useful in other fields. These include preregistration, open materials and data, and registered reports. These reforms are necessary and offer education research a path to increased credibility and social impact. But they all operate at the level of individual researchers’ behavior. In this paper, we discuss models of large-scale collaborative research practices and how they can be applied to educational research. The combination of large-scale collaboration with open and transparent research practices offers education researchers an exciting new method for falsifying theories, verifying what we know, resolving disagreements, and exploring new questions.

Proposal to NSF 19-565 to Create a STEM Education Research Hub

“…• Enhancing measure transparency & validity : developing practices & psychometric models to support accumulative education science (Flake, Davidson, Wong, and Pek, 2019;Flake & McCoach, 2019) • Special Education Research Accelerator : A web-based platform to coordinate and conduct crowdsourced studies in special education that involve concurrent replications across multiple sites and research teams (Therrien & Cook, in progress (Makel, Smith, McBee, Peters, & Miller, 2019) The Hub will catalyze innovation and collaboration on rigor and methodology for issues like these, and others that we haven't yet identified. Researchers will be encouraged to submit their innovative work.…”

Sharing Economy: The new economic institution

“…The second is related to virtual platforms for collaborative education which is looking for: a) the generation of platforms to share knowledge or educational services and b) the generation of virtual learning environments where knowledge is made available in an unschooling way for all whoever wants to consult it. Collaborative research (Makel et al, 2019) that seeks to share research results and the integration of open knowledge networks (Lara, 2014) is part of this trend.…”

Replication crisis or an opportunity to improve scientific production?

“…For example, it would be interesting to reward researchers who participate in developing and executing a research plan within a collaborative and transparent work team (e.g., multi-lab collaborations) in order to foster criticism and self-criticism in each phase of the study. In addition, the study design would be more rigorous, and it would be possible to improve the external validity of the findings and analyse their replicability (Makel, Smith, McBee, Peters, & Miller, 2019). Encouraging studies stemming from adversarial collaborations is also an important incentive for researchers.…”