Mitigating Illusory Results Through Pre-Registration in Education

Like performance enhancing drugs inflating apparent athletic achievements, several common social science practices contribute to the production of illusory results. In this article, we examine the processes that lead to illusory findings and describe their consequences. Borrowing from an approach used increasingly by other disciplines—the norm of pre-registering studies—we examine how this practice could improve scientific integrity within education. As an initial attempt to develop guidelines that facilitate pre-registrations in education, we discuss the types of studies that ought to be pre-registered and the logistics of how educational researchers might execute pre-registrations. We conclude with ideas for how researchers, reviewers, and the field of education more broadly might speed the adoption of this new norm