Education and Training

In addition to our Research Transparency and Reproducibility Trainings (RT2) and on-demand workshops, we harness our network of graduate students, academic faculty, and other researchers to scale-up education on research transparency across the social sciences. By drawing from and strengthening the BITSS Resource Library, this network may use any number of delivery mechanisms, such as integrating into existing curricula, seminars, workshops, or boot camps.

Check out an infographic with insights from our training events here.

Objectives of Training Activities

BITSS aims to ensure that current and future generations of economists, psychologists, political scientists, and other social scientists:

Master critical thinking skills as they relate to social science research

This includes a full understanding of current research on challenges in producing quality social science research today: researcher bias and motivated reasoning, publication bias, ethical and unethical research practices, reproducibility, and data privacy issues.

Master and apply research transparency techniques

To manage researcher bias and other challenges involved in conducting transparent and reproducible research, our education and training activities focus on the following practices:

• Pre-registration. Use of appropriate resources for pre-registering studies.
• Pre-Analysis Plans. Development and application of pre-analysis plans to research design and implementation.
• Workflow management. Transparent management of study materials, data, and code using version control such as GitHub, dynamic documents, the Open Science Framework, and repositories such as Dataverse.
• Appropriate use of statistics. Adequate powering of studies to avoid false positives, adjustment of statistical tests for multiplicity of hypotheses, and use of appropriate meta-analytic techniques.