Preregistration: the what, why and how?

A self-paced tutorial on the key concepts, practices and tools involved in preregistration, from why it exists as an open science practice to how to write and evaluate one.

Tutorial Overview

This self-paced tutorial will introduce you to the key concepts, practices and tools involved in preregistration. Preregistration is an open science practice that is increasingly adopted.

This tutorial is intended to take X hours to complete.

The tutorial is split into the following five sections:

1. Introduction to preregistration provides an introduction to the context of why preregistration exists as an open science practice. This section discusses key concepts and topics such as different research methodologies (e.g. qualitative, experimental, observational), confirmatory vs exploratory analysis, questionable research practices.
2. How to do a preregistration briefly outlines the essential and recommended elements to include in a study preregistration, with resources to find templates by research method.
3. Challenges and opportunities of preregistration explores the challenges and opportunities of doing a preregistration from an individual researcher perspective to the wider research ecosystem.
4. Building a preregistration toolkit provides opportunities to practice improving parts of a study preregistration from research questions to analysis plans.
5. Evaluating preregistration quality provides guidance and resources to critically evaluate existing preregistration, to equip learners with the tools to complete their own study preregistration.

This tutorial will take you on a journey from:

“I am not sure what preregistration is or why it is important” to: “I feel empowered to adopt the principles of preregistration”

Learning objectives
By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:

• identify the components of a preregistration,

• recognize challenges and opportunities of preregistration,

• propose solutions to navigating barriers to implementing a preregistration, and

• evaluate the quality of a preregistration.

TipPrerequisites

This tutorial assumes you have the following:

Familiarity with the steps in the research life cycle, the different types of variables (independent, dependent and covariates)

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TipQuestions about this tutorial?

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