Town hall on methodological issues

Our department just had its first ever town hall event. The goal was to have an open discussion of issues surrounding reproducibility and other methodological challenges. Here's the announcement: 

Please join us for a special Psychology Colloquium event: Town Hall on Contemporary Methodological Issues in Psychological Science.

Professors Lee Ross, Mike Frank, and Russ Poldrack will each give a ten-minute talk, sharing their perspectives on contemporary methodological issues within their respective fields. There will be opportunities for both small and large group discussion.

I gave a talk on my evolving views on reproducibility, many summarized here, specifically focusing on the issue that individual studies tend not to be definitive. I advocated for a series of changes to our default practice, including: 

1. Larger Ns
2. Multiple internal replications
3. Measurement and estimation, rather than statistical significance
4. Experimental “debugging” tools (e.g., manipulation checks, negative/positive controls)
5. Preregistration where appropriate 
6. Everything open – materials, data, code – by default

I then illustrated this with a couple of recent examples of work I've been involved in. If you're interested in seeing the presentation, my slides are available here. Overall, the town hall was a real success, with a lot of lively discussion and plenty of student voices discussing their concerns.