Teaching transparency: principles and practical considerations with illustrations in R and Stata

This chapter advocates incorporating principles and practices of research transparency and reproducibility into undergraduate research methods courses. These principles and practices are increasingly essential and should be incorporated into methods courses as early as possible in order to develop an awareness of transparency and good habits. The chapter proceeds in five sections: (1) a clarification about what constitutes transparency; (2) a discussion of why transparency is important, including a the ongoing reproducibility crisis across disciplines, as well as material and nonmaterial motivations for transparency; (3) practices of transparency, including illustrations in R and Stata; and (5) a discussion of implementation tradeoffs. The conclusion closes with a discussion of the ongoing debates about transparency in our discipline and the need for a diversity of approaches.