Teaching Statistics Graduate Students the Importance of Reproducible Research

• Activity Number: 342 - SPEED: Sports to Fire: Fascinating Applications of Statistics
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, July 31, 2018 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Kristen McQuerry*
• Companies: University of Kentucky
• Keywords: reproducible research

Abstract

The Applied Statistics Lab (ASL) at the University of Kentucky employs statistics graduate students while servicing the statistical needs across our campus. Often times, graduate students inherit unfinished projects from fellow peers that have graduated or are no longer working for the ASL. Because of limited reproducible practices, transitioning and continuing these unfinished projects has proven to be difficult. Fourteen UK statistics graduate students taking a statistical consulting course were given data, statistical programming code, and a demographics table from a previous project. Students were asked to reproduce the demographics table from the given code. Students were also required to document all changes and comments about the usability of the code. Currently, I am formulating new ideas to alter our standard operating procedures in order to better prepare our students for creating reproducible research.