I previously suggested that using CUREs to perform research reproduction could be a great solution to a number of issues:
- no funding agencies want to fund studies to reproduce published results, but CUREs have institutional funding and infrastructure
- knowing whether published results are reproducible is a noted point of concern in the scientific community
- reproduction isn't broadly publishable, so it is difficult for mentors to task mentees with such low-career-reward projects
- undergraduates in lab courses (CUREs) could still benefit from learning how to read a manuscript, following the published methods, conducting the data analysis and interpretation, and then critically reflecting on how/why any discrepancies exist
I was invited to share this idea with the attendees of the June 2021 Bridging Research and Education With Model ORganisms (BREWMOR) conference, sponsored by the Genetics Society of America. Video from all of the invited talks is available here.
In the discussion that followed, I learned from another conferee (who I don't remember, but I attribute this idea to them!) of another use of research reproduction in a CURE context:
At the beginning of the academic term, when many CURE instructors task students with practicing fundamental techniques before embarking on their own research projects, ask students to reproduce published research as part of that practice, with the idea that reproduction of published data is used to validate that the student has mastered the related techniques and is ready to proceed.
I can imagine that this approach would not only be useful to the instructor as a metric for gauging student progress and mastery but also might improve student mindset or sense of self-efficacy. I'm adopting this idea in my next CURE!
