Monitoring Researchers' Open Science Practices in Education

Open Science is a movement permeating disciplinary boundaries with the goal of improving scientific conduct by sharing processes with a wider audience (cf. Fecher & Friesike, 2014). For example, van der Zee and Reich (2018) describe for the case of education science, that open science addresses replicability problems, like costs of accessing research articles, the selective reporting of studies with statistically significant results, or the so called researchers degree of freedom in conducting studies in a way that they have desired results. Against this background, Open Science seems to be a desirable goal to move to. To be able to study how researchers can be motivated to actually do open science, it is necessary to quantify their endorsement of open science. A quantitative conceptualization of the adoption of open science practices allows to compare causes for open science, makes it possible to show how the adoption of open science practices develops over time, and allows to study open science practices as predictor for further outcomes, for example for successful grant proposals.

The goal of the current project is to monitor the use of open scientific practices in education science in Germany. Therefore, we developed a theoretically derived questionnaire with the goal to assess the degree to which a broad range of open scientific practices are done, which we refer to as scientific openness. This questionnaire will be used in a large sample of educational researchers in Germany. We will relate individuals’ scientific openness to disciplinary backgrounds, scientific approaches, as well as attitudes towards scientific norms and open science. The project aims to answer three questions: (a) How open is education science in Germany, (b) which constructs are associated with scientific openness on the individual level, and (c) which constructs are associated with scientific openness on the contextual level?