Great post about introducing students to the fundamental concept of reproducibility in science while teaching them R
A recently published paper by Baumer et al (2014) caught my eye today (HT to Bruce Caron). I wanted to share it here because I thought it was cool and also had a few comments to make about some of the issues the authors raised.
First, a bit about the paper. Partly in response to all the media attention to the crisis in reproducibility in science (e.g. Nature) Baumer and colleagues made some changes to introductory statistics classes at Duke, Smith, and Amherst. The primary change was to require the use of R Markdown for all homework. RStudio was the editor they used and it appears any cutting and pasting of code, figures, etc. was not allowed. They conducted a survey of the students early in the class and after the class. The end result was that students preferred using R Markdown over the typical mode of cut and…
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Ana I. Moreno-Monroy 