Bridging Open Scholarship with Higher Education and Postgraduate Training in Autism: A Primer and Guide

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Abstract

Over the past two decades, activists and autism researchers have raised many constructive criticisms regarding pedagogical and research practices in the fields of autism. While other fields have been focusing on greater openness and transparency to address concerns in research standards, discussions and implementations of Open Scholarship (OSch) in autism research and in teaching about autism have been limited. One crucial direction to promote OSch is through education and training. In this paper, we provide concrete recommendations to promote OSch practices in autism-focused education, and these recommendations are likely helpful for courses in the fields of clinical psychology, educational psychology, and developmental psychology. Recommendations focus on embedding practices such as transparency and reproducibility, pre-registration and replication as well as highlighting the role of OSch in promoting scientific literacy. Moreover, we promote social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education and professional training through the incorporation of autistic- and neurodiversity-based perspectives, research findings related to neurodiversity perspectives, contents regarding participatory research and adversarial collaborations into courses. We believe that applying OSch principles and practices in education of students, researchers, and future practitioners will substantially improve autism research and related practices.Keywords: Autism, Diversity, Higher Education, Open Scholarship, Replicability, Reproducibility, Social Justice, NeurodiversityNote: Inspired by reviewers' comments, we separated the initial manuscript (https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xzkjh) into three manuscripts, two for research and one for education (this one).

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