Undergraduate Psychology Students’ Perceptions of Open Research: The Relationship Between Statistics Understanding, Attitudes, and Questionable Research Practices

Abstract

Following growing awareness of replication concerns in research and the rise of Open Research (OR), psychologists have begun investigating what contributes to Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) amongst academics but less so amongst students. Undergraduates represent the next generation of psychologists, and recent changes in the undergraduate psychology curricula across UK universities have enhanced and modernised the provision of research methods and statistics teaching. Still, students continue to struggle with statistics, and how students perceive OR practices may be associated with their experiences learning statistics. In this two-study UK-wide project, we employed a series of online questionnaires to investigate the relationships between various factors including statistics understanding and attitudes and undergraduate students’ perceptions of OR and QRPs. In Study 1 (N = 267), we found that, in final-year psychology students, awareness of OR was related to perceptions of QRPs as well as statistics confidence and grades. In Study 2 (N = 695), in psychology students across all years, we found that attitudes toward statistics were associated with statistics confidence, competence, and attitudes toward learning about OR. We also found that statistics interpretation aptitude and statistics attitudes predicted perceptions of OR. Our findings have important implications for the teaching of OR, science, and statistics, and for incorporating OR into higher education curricula.