Every baseball season, many home runs are hit by various players across the major leagues. But in all of history, there is one home run that stands out for baseball fans. In the 1932 World Series, Babe Ruth (born in Baltimore!) pointed to the center field fence. He then hit the next pitch over that fence, exactly where he said he would.
Just 86 years later, the U.S. Department of Education, in collaboration with the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE), launched a new (figurative) center field fence for educational evaluation. It’s called the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies (REES). The purpose of REES is to ask evaluators of educational programs to register their research designs, measures, analyses, and other features in advance. This is roughly the equivalent of asking researchers to point to the center field fence, announcing their intention to hit the ball right there. The reason this matters is that all too often, evaluators carry out evaluations that do not produce desired, positive outcomes on some measures or some analyses. They then report outcomes only on the measures that did show positive outcomes, or they might use different analyses from those initially planned, or only report outcomes for a subset of their full sample. On this last point, I remember a colleague long ago who obtained and re-analyzed data from a large and important national study that studied several cities but only reported data for Detroit. In her analyses of data from the other cities, she found that the results the authors claimed were seen only in Detroit, not in any other city.
REES pre-registration will, over time, make it possible for researchers, reviewers, and funders to find out whether evaluators are reporting all of the findings and all of the analyses as they originally planned them. I would assume that within a period of years, review facilities such as the What Works Clearinghouse will start requiring pre-registration before accepting studies for its top evidence categories. We will certainly do so for Evidence for ESSA. As pre-registration becomes common (as it surely will, if IES is suggesting or requiring it), review facilities such as WWC and Evidence for ESSA will have to learn how to use the pre-registration information. Obviously, minor changes in research designs or measures may be allowed, especially small changes made before posttests are known. For example, if some schools named in pre-registration are not in the posttest sample, the evaluators might explain that the schools closed (not a problem if this did not upset pretest equivalence), but if they withdrew for other reasons, reviewers would want to know why, and would insist that withdrawn schools be included in any intent-to-treat (ITT) analysis. Other fields, including much of medical research, have been using pre-registration for many years, and I’m sure REES and review facilities in education could learn from their experiences and policies.
What I find most heartening in REES and pre-registration is that it is an indication of how much and how rapidly educational research has matured in a short time. Ten years ago REES could not have been realistically proposed. There was too little high-quality research to justify it, and frankly, few educators or policy makers cared very much about the findings of rigorous research. There is still a long way to go in this regard, but embracing pre-registration is one way we say to our profession and ourselves that the quality of evidence in education can stand up to that in any other field, and that we are willing to hold ourselves accountable for the highest standards.
In baseball history, Babe Ruth’s “pre-registered” home run in the 1932 series is referred to as the “called shot.” No one had ever done it before, and no one ever did it again. But in educational evaluation, we will soon be calling our shots all the time. And when we say in advance exactly what we are going to do, and then do it, just as we promised, showing real benefits for children, then educational evaluation will take a major step forward in increasing users’ confidence in the outcomes.
Photo credit: Babe Ruth, 1920, unattributed photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.
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