Beyond the Original: Exploring Replication Research in Higher Education

In this chapter, the authors outline what replication research is and explain why this could be a helpful tool to support the trustworthiness and credibility of (earlier) research findings. Replication research has received increased attention in the light of the so-called ‘replication crisis’: a series of studies in psychology failed to reproduce the findings from previous studies. In higher education, replication research is relatively rare, and researchers should be aware of various challenges. The authors take stock of studies on higher education – most of these in the area of teaching and learning – that have used a replication design. Somewhat surprisingly, many studies in our field are not sufficiently clear about what exactly has been replicated and in some cases the term replication was misused. We conclude that replication research can be useful, but researchers carefully need to consider whether their approach indeed contributes to increased trustworthiness and credibility of earlier findings.