Lesson Plans

Motivation

Developing educational resources is essential to facilitate engagement with, adherence to, and learning of research transparency, replicability, openness, and reproducibility. Despite the growing awareness of the benefits of training reproducible methods within undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, there remains a lack of systematic incorporation of open scholarship practices in taught courses across Higher Education. While many pedagogical resources are regularly developed for this purpose, they are not often openly and actively shared with the wider community. While the potential reasons for this are diverse, one reason may be the dearth of available ready-to-use educational resources.

To support instructors aiming to bridge that gap, FORRT’s community built open educational resources that can be integrated into taught courses ‘out of the box’. As creating or changing course content can be onerous and time-consuming, we aimed to make evidence-based, high-quality lesson plans and activities available to teaching faculty, thus reducing the labour required to develop and implement open scholarship content.

We compiled lesson plans and activities, and categorized them based on their theme, learning outcome, and method of delivery, which are made publicly available here.

Lesson Plans

You can find all lesson plans in this OSF repository, and here’s one example about Interpreting effect sizes and confidence intervals and another on Prediction Markets.

Each has suitable context: (e.g., entry-level/undergraduate/postgraduate), total time: (e.g., 1 hour, 2 hours, 1 day, etc.), pre-requisites, related resources (e.g. slides, assignment materials, lecture recordings, etc), learning outcomes, broken down per activity length (10min, 30min, etc.). Here are all the topics for which we have prepared Lesson Plans so far:

1. Interpreting effect sizes and confidence intervals
2. Registered Replication Report
3. How to be critical not cynical
4. Intro to Open Science lesson plan
5. Understanding the replication crisis with app activities
6. Dodgy papers
7. Research paradigms and open science
8. Open Data and Qualitative Research
9. Diversity and inclusion in (br)open science
10. Differentiating between correlation vs causation
11. Implicit Bias
12. Diversity as one of the core values of Open Science
13. Diversity and research
14. Oppression and Power
15. Generalizability Crisis
16. The myth of the normality: How neurodiversity dismantles the generalisability crisis Text 1  Text 2
17. The myth of the normality: How neurodiversity dismantles the generalisability crisis - Lesson Plan
18. Neurodiversity Culture and Teaching - text Lesson Plan Pdf Neurodiversity Culture and Teaching - Lesson Plan
19. Avoiding ableist language to diversify OS - textLesson Plan pdf Avoiding ableist language to diversify OS
20. How can Open Scholarship address structural ableism and racism? Text 1  Text 2 LessonPlan Pdf How can Open Scholarship address structural ableism and racism?

We hope to keep producing more Lesson Plans, so please check this space. Our community is working on this “Table of Activities” to which you can add your own ideas (see how to contribute below) and help us empower educators and stakeholders with high quality and accessible lesson plans (and educational materials) to accelerate institutional change towards the integration of open and reproducible science into Higher Education curricula!

Lastly, accompanying the Lesson Plans, FORRT’s team wrote a short manuscript entitled “Embedding open and reproducible teaching into undergraduate training” (OA Postprint) which was published in the APA’s Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, where we describe and openly share a bank of teaching resources and lesson plans on the broad topics of open scholarship, open science, replication, and reproducibility that can be readily integrated into taught courses.

Feedback

Please consider giving us your feedback (critical or otherwise) when using these materials so that we can learn how to improve these resources.

Relevant External Lesson Plans

• United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Open Pedagogy has several lesson plans on how to teach about the UN’s SDGs (e.g., SDG 04: Quality Education, SDG 05: Gender Equality, SDG 08: Decent Work and Economic Growth, SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions and more.)

Contribute

You can still contribute to the collection of Lesson Plans by adding your ideas in the Google sheet below. Furthermore, if you would like your lesson plans to be included among the several others in this OSF repository, please use the Lesson Plan’s template and contact Madeleine Pownall or Flavio Azevedo at FORRT’s slack channel. Or feel free to email info@forrt.org.

Pedagogical Activities

Open the full table in Google Sheets. On a narrow screen, the table below scrolls sideways.

Contribute to FORRT’s Lesson Plans (Google sheets)

These resources were created as part of the Society for Improving Psychological Science (SIPS) hackathon at the 2021 Annual Conference, and we detail this collaborative process in the article.

Contributorship

In line with principles enshrined in FORRT, this google-sheet is an open online contributorship project. The work of all contributors is valued and formally recognized. With this, we hope to expand the scope and diversity of FORRT’s mission and its team.