The developers of a new open-access curriculum to teach rigor discuss confirmation bias and other common errors in scientific thinking, plus ways to avoid these missteps.
(19 Mar 2025) It’s easy to do less-than-rigorous science without realizing it. Yet there isn’t a systematic way to learn good science practice, says Konrad Kording, professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. As a student, “it felt like I was soaking all that up from my supervisor, and there was no training,” he says.
So Kording helped create the formal training he lacked: Community for Rigor, a science-education initiative funded by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. (The five-year grant is slated to run until July 2027.) An administrative center Kording leads at the University of Pennsylvania designed the online resource, which houses educational units created in conjunction with teams at nine other institutions. The group released its first free, open-access training, which focuses on confirmation bias, this week and plans to publish four others throughout 2025.
