Crossroads: Using decision making strategies to develop high impact content for training in rigor and transparency.

PROJECT SUMMARY Scientific research can benefit from healthy self-examination and agile, data-driven corrections. The “Reproducibility Crisis” has necessitated structural changes amongst publishers and funders, but individual scientists have not received the level of training necessary to fix common issues in rigor and inadequacies in transparent reporting that contribute to replication problems. While the crisis has prompted numerous workshops, opinion pieces, and quantified replication evaluations in neuroscience, the development of cohesive and high impact training opportunities has not yet occurred. The inaccessibility of training modules makes it difficult to formally train scientists whether they are beginners (e.g., undergraduate students) or seasoned researchers (e.g., tenured professors) without an unrealistic individual time commitment from the scientists themselves. The development of stand-alone educational units covering issues of the scientific process from the philosophical foundations of science all the way to the reporting of data and methods in a transparent manner are critical to making this training both accessible and acceptable to researchers. At the University of Texas at Dallas, we have assembled a team of stakeholders and supporters with rich backgrounds in basic neuroscience research, psychology research and clinical practice, education curricula development, pedagogy research, and the reproducibility crisis itself to build three high impact educational units that will be integrated into the digital platform developed by the Creating an Educational Nexus for Training in Experimental Rigor (CENTER) group. Our focus is on three critical and practical areas of the crisis: (1) Recording of data and methods (2) Exploratory vs confirmatory research, and (3) Interpreting and reporting findings.