The replication crisis should be taught as an essential component of the undergraduate psychology curriculum

By Charlotte Pennington

Replication is the cornerstone of science. In order to know whether a hypothesised effect is true, research studies need to be repeated to see whether findings are consistent. Only after one, or several, successful replications should a result be recognised as scientific knowledge.

But in recent years, Psychology and many other research disciplines have found themselves in a replication crisis. Large-scale replication attempts have shown that many psychological findings crumble under closer inspection (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), cascading this discipline into a period of deep reflection (Munafò et al., 2017).

I am a child of the replication crisis. I completed my PhD on the topic of ‘stereotype threat’: an influential phenomenon which proposes that knowledge of negative societal stereotypes (e.g., “women are bad at mathematics”) can have a detrimental effect on performance (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Because of the wealth of convincing published literature on this topic, I jumped straight into examining the underlying mechanisms of the stereotype threat-performance relationship. But I fell at the first hurdle; time and time again, I couldn’t replicate this typical ‘stereotype threat’ effect, which meant that exploring the underlying mechanisms was impossible. I felt like a failure; how could other researchers routinely find these effects? How was I going to pass my PhD with a bunch of ‘failed’ studies?

If only I had known what has been learnt since the advent of the replication crisis; that many researchers fail to replicate or reproduce scientific findings (Baker, 2016), including stereotype threat (e.g., Agnoli et al., 2021; Gibson et al. 2014; Moon & Roeder 2014), and the published literature is distorted by publication bias (Flore et al. 2015; Shewach et al. 2019). But why did I not know all of this when pursuing my PhD? Why did I pursue the topic of stereotype threat in the first place? Well, replications have rarely been performed in psychology (Koole & Lakens, 2012; Nosek et al., 2012), and I argue that this has leaked into the teaching of psychology. Just like the published literature, the psychology curriculum is filled with flashy, exciting, and seemingly impactful research studies. Replication is left forgotten as the cornerstone of science.

Is the replication crisis taught in today’s psychology curriculum?

I wanted to know whether the experiences I faced as an undergraduate student may be true of those studying psychology today. After all, I completed my PhD in 2016 just as the replication crisis was becoming recognised. I, therefore, asked Psychology academics on Twitter whether replication and the associated ‘crisis’ is taught at their institution (and I replicated this result on Mastodon!). Approximately 60% of the 51 respondents replied ‘Yes’ and 37% ‘No’. When asked whether this was covered throughout the curriculum, the vote flipped to a majority ‘No’ (67%), and when asked if it was recapped at the stage where undergraduates complete their independent research project, a huge 70% voted ‘No’.

Whilst admittedly this was a bit of fun, this can be assessed objectively by looking at the accreditation standards for Psychology programmes, which aim to ensure that quality standards in higher education and training are being met. In the United Kingdom, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA, 2019; 2022) publishes a Subject Benchmark Statement for Psychology that defines what can be expected of a graduate in this subject, and many Psychology programmes are accredited by the British Psychological Society (BPS, 2019). Whilst these standards cover what modules should be taught as core components of a Psychology degree, as well as their specific curriculum areas, they do not mention the importance of teaching about the replication crisis. Teaching of the replication crisis (and resultantly scientific reform/open science) could simply be embedded into the guidance for core modules (e.g., social psychology, research methods, conceptual and historical issues in psychology). Replications should be explicitly permitted for empirical projects (see also Frank & Saxe, 2012; Wagge et al., 2019; Quintana, 2021), and we should look beyond ‘novelty’ and ‘original contributions’ when evaluating research. Allowing students to pursue non-replicable lines of research can lead students down the wrong path and waste limited yet valuable resources.

Teaching the replication crisis as the ‘credibility revolution’

The replication crisis has also been termed the ‘credibility revolution’ (Vazire, 2018) to reflect the fast-paced improvements to the way that research is conducted. Open science practices, including preprints and open access publishing, preregistration, Registered Reports, and open materials, code, and data, have been developed to enhance replication and reproducibility. Some educators have expressed concerns that teaching about the replication crisis might turn students away from studying Psychology and, as a result, entering this field as a chosen career. However, outlining the recent history of the replication crisis can enhance students’ critical awareness of the problems that occur within research and the wider research culture, and help them to understand and contribute to the solutions. In my experience, students are fascinated by the issues that Psychology faces, and the optimistic future that this discipline sets out for improving science.

To help students learn about the (recent) history of the replication crisis and to aid educators in teaching this, I have written a book titled: “A Student’s Guide to Open Science: Using the Replication Crisis to Reform Psychology” (Pennington, 2023). This book aims to help students to develop a fundamental understanding of the origins and drivers of the crisis and learn how open science practices can enhance research transparency, replication, and reproducibility. With a handy, digestible guide for students and researchers alike on how to implement open science practices within their own workflow, as well as pedagogic teaching and learning activities that can be re-used by educators, this book has been labelled “an essential guide to navigating the replication crisis”.

From a personal point of view, I wrote this book for my younger self -- in other words, for the talented and passionate students starting out in the field of psychology. By knowing about psychology’s history, the good parts but also the messy parts, our students can be the grassroots to make this discipline even better. It is therefore my hope that this book will become essential reading for every psychology student and one that they return to throughout their studies and beyond. 

In addition to this, there are also many other fantastic organisations and resources that champion teaching on replication and open science. For example, the Framework for Open & Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) provide tonnes of open educational resources including an open science glossary (Parsons et al., 2022) and a bank of openly available lesson plans (Pownall et al., 2022) that reduce the barriers to implementing such teaching into the curriculum. Journal clubs such as ReproducibiliTEA (Orben, 2019) also aim to bring crucial discussions about student research training to the forefront. Underpinned by these resources, I’d like to look back on this blog post in future years to see that a change has taken effect – accreditation standards are updated so that the replication crisis is taught as an essential component of the undergraduate psychology curriculum, and students are undertaking exciting replications for their empirical project to further progress scientific reform.

Charlotte R. Pennington is a Lecturer in Psychology at Aston University, Birmingham, UK and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is an expert in open science and advocates for the teaching of this within higher education pedagogy. She is the Author of “A student’s guide to open science: Using the replication crisis to reform psychology".