Reproducibility breakout session at USCOTS

Somehow almost an entire academic year went by without a blog post, I must have been busy… It’s time to get back in the saddle! (I’m using the classical definition of this idiom here, “doing something you stopped doing for a period of time”, not the urban dictionary definition, “when you are back to doing what you do best”, as I really don’t think writing blog posts are what I do best…)

One of the exciting things I took part in during the year was the NSF supported Reproducible Science Hackathon held at NESCent in Durham back in December.

I wrote here a while back about making reproducibility a central focus of students’ first introduction to data analysis, which is an ongoing effort in my intro stats course. The hackathon was a great opportunity to think about promoting reproducibility to a much wider audience than intro stat students — wider with respect to statistical background, computational skills, and discipline. The goal of the hackathon was to develop a two day workshop for reproducible research, or more specifically, reproducible data analysis and computation. Materials from the hackathon can be found here and are all CC0 licensed.

If this happened in December, why am I talking about this now? I was at USCOTS these last few days, and lead a breakout session with Nick Horton on reproducibility, building on some of the materials we developed at the hackathon and framing them for a stat ed audience. The main goals of the session were

1. to introduce statistics educators to RMarkdown via hands on exercises and promote it as a tool for reproducible data analysis and
2. to demonstrate that with the right exercises and right amount of scaffolding it is possible (and in fact easier!) to teach R through the use of RMarkdown, and hence train new researchers whose only data analysis workflow is a reproducible one.

In the talk I also discussed briefly further tips for documentation and organization as well as for getting started with version control tools like GitHub. Slides from my talk can be found here and all source code for the talk is here.

There was lots of discussion at USCOTS this year about incorporating more analysis of messy and complex data and more research into the undergraduate statistics curriculum. I hope that there will be an effort to not just do “more” with data in the classroom, but also do “better” with it, especially given that tools that easily lend themselves to best practices in reproducible data analysis (RMarkdown being one such example) are now more accessible than ever.