Hi again POWER, a friendly reminder about our exciting upcoming event with very special guests. This Group Discussion Event will be held on Wednesday September 29th from 1-2:30 (eastern time) via Zoom.
 
Discussion Breakout Rooms will include the following topics, each co-facilitated by our invited guests and members of the mentoring committee.
 
Careers outside academia
Supporting diverse mentees
Promoting equity in research and dissemination
Writing statements for tenure and promotion
 
Invited guests who will be facilitating discussions include:
Nicole Patton Terry -Florida State University
Julia Mendez -University of North Carolina Greensboro
Carola Oliva-Olson – SRI International
Doré LaForett – Child Trends
 
Each attendee will have the opportunity to participate in multiple extended discussions.
 
To Register click HERE: https://fsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4HIflZkcXEKP34a
 
Please feel free to forward this email to colleagues, peers, and friends—non-members and those considering joining POWER are more than welcome to attend! We hope this will be very well attended to show the power of POWER to our guests!
 
We look forward to having you join us and our guests!

​            Many people are interested in preregistrations but are worried they don’t know how to do them or will do them wrong. What’s interesting about preregistrations is pretty much everyone who has been to graduate school has completed at least one preregistration: a prospectus! In your prospectus, you lay out your research questions, hypotheses, and plan for how you will collect and analyze your data, and often, you include a power analysis. Preregistration is when a researcher publicly posts their study plans before conducting the study, including aspects such as research questions, hypotheses, sampling plan, independent and dependent variables, and analysis plans. The preregistration is then posted openly on the Internet, with a timestamp, before the study is started.
              You might have also heard of registered reports, which are a type of preregistration that occurs with peer-review. Many of our field’s journals now have registered reports (e.g., Journal of Educational Psychology, Developmental Science; a full list is https://cos.io/rr/). With a registered report, you write the introduction and the methods section, including the proposed analysis and power analysis (making them just like a prospectus), before conducting the study. You then submit this to a journal for Stage 1 review. Review then occurs normally but rather than being focused on the results, it’s focused on the importance of the research question and the proposed methods. If the journal accepts your Stage 1 manuscript, the journal accepts the paper “in principle.” Then, you go and complete the study, write up the remainder of the paper (not changing the introduction or methods other than tense changes), and submit it as a Stage 2 manuscript. At this stage, the reviewers are contacted again to make sure you followed your plan and that the results are appropriately discussed and reported. But a Stage 2 manuscript cannot be rejected *because* of the results, helping reduce publication bias and protecting you if you get null effects (which are unfortunately hard to publish normally).
              Preregistering your study has numerous benefits. First, you might be required to do it if you are a federally funded investigator (it is one of the SEER principles!). Second, preregistration makes your a priori hypotheses clear, allowing you to differentiate between confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Third, preregistration reduces questionable research practices, such as peeking at data, selective reporting (e.g., looking for an effect over many related outcome variables and selecting to publish the one that was statistically significant only), HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results Known), p-hacking, and the like. Fourth, when you do a registered report, you get the benefit of additional smart people working through your research questions and methods with you, increasing the chance of useful reviewer comments that improve your science.
              Are you interested in trying out a preregistration?  Any type of study can be preregistered, including secondary data analyses, reviews, and qualitative work. Fortunately, there is a growing repository of templates you can fill out to help you complete your preregistration. Before starting, try to Google and see if you can find a template to help guide you through the process. I’ve also found other people’s preregistrations and used them as templates when I couldn’t find a standard one. A very handy list of templates that might help you is available https://osf.io/zab38/wiki/home/, and for meta-analysis, check out https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/ (which walks you through questions and then posts your preregistration in one place).  Complete your preregistration, and then post it anywhere that will time stamp your document, and hopefully give you a DOI, making it citable. I’ve used OSF (https://help.osf.io/hc/en-us/articles/360019738834-Create-a-Preregistration), figshare (https://figshare.com/), Prospero (linked above), Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) (https://sreereg.icpsr.umich.edu), and AsPredicted (www.aspredicted.org). Then write up your study, using your preregistration as your guide for your analyses! If you’ve made a mistake with your preregistration, just note in your manuscript what is not preregistered and continue on your way.
              My own experiences with preregistrations have been mostly positive. When doing them, it feels as though you are slowing your research process and that can be frustrating. It frontloads a lot of work which we normally reserve for later, and it means a study is not “starting.” But when it comes time to write up the study paper, writing the methods and results is a breeze. I’ve also found that it really can be remarkable how reflecting on your analysis steps can be refreshing, especially firmly being able to differentiate between exploratory and confirmatory analyses. Preregistering every part of your analysis plan can be very difficult, especially for complex analyses. I have a preregistered paper published where I laid out a plan for if my variables were skewed but forgot to give a plan for if they were kurtotic! All I did was simply say explicitly in the paper that I didn’t preregister what I would do, but that I would follow my plan for if I had had skewed data (which fortunately worked to correct my kurtotic variable). I have also found that a preregistration can protect you during the review process from reviewers who want to change your paper with analyses you didn’t plan to do. In a different era, I might have felt tempted to work them into the manuscript, and maybe try to tell a story about why they were there. Now, I can either point to my preregistration and say that those analyses are not part of this study, or I can do the analyses, clearly label it as exploratory (and I’ve even explicitly said that a reviewer requested it in the text!), and just leave it there, not woven into the story. I encourage you to try out doing a preregistration. It will not be as foreign as you might think before doing your first one. It is the same research process you are used to, just in a different order than you are used to.

More resources on preregistrations, and open science more broadly:
van Dijk, W., Schatschneider, C., & Hart, S.A. (2021). Open science in education sciences. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 54(2), 139-152. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420945267
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Cook, B.G., Fleming, J.I., Hart, S.A., Lane, K.L., Therrien, W., van Dijk, W., Wilson, S. (in press). A how-to guide for open-science practices in special education research. Remedial and Special Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/07419325211019100 (open access version, https://edarxiv.org/zmeba/)

In January 2021, The POWER Mentoring Committee hosted a wonderful discussion with one of our dynamic Ambassadors, Dr. Shelley Gray, about mentoring students and junior colleagues. Dr. Gray shared excellent advice regarding how to structure mentoring relationships in ways that are beneficial to both the mentor and the mentee. POWER members engaged in a robust discussion about the challenges and satisfactions of mentoring. Dr. Gray has provided us with the slides from this event with us, so the larger community can benefit from her guidance. We share them with you all here: 

The Mentoring Committee invites you to join us and one of our esteemed POWER ambassadors, Dr. Shelley Gray, in a conversation about mentoring within academia. This event is thematically focused on mentoring from the perspective of the mentor, to provide a forum for discussion about issues such as how to establish a mentoring relationship with mentees, how to decide who to mentor and with what types of engagement, how to ensure that the mentoring relationship is beneficial for both parties, and other key aspects of a sustained mentoring relationship with students and colleagues.
 
Dr. Gray is Professor of Speech and Hearing Science in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. She has substantial experience in mentoring colleagues and students both within her home institution and across institutions, especially given her involvement in multiple multi-site research projects.  
 More information on Dr. Gray’s many career achievements is included in her biography on the POWER website.
 
We look forward to an engaging and enriching conversation and invite POWER members at all career stages to participate. Bring your thoughts, experiences as mentor and mentee, and questions for Dr. Gray and the community.

Enhancing the Mentoring Experience: A Conversation with POWER Ambassador Dr. Shelley Gray
Thursday January 28th
3-4 pm eastern time/1-2 pm mountain time
A virtual event hosted on Zoom by the POWER Mentoring Committee
Click on this link to signup! 

Announcing a virtual event, organized by the POWER Professional Development Committee. 

Come join POWER on November 19th at 11am Eastern / 10 Central for an online discussion about how to move school-based research forward with respectful, responsible inquiry during the COVID-19 pandemic. The one-hour discussion will be based on an article written by Drs. Kathleen Lane, Sonia Cabell, and Sally Drew (https://edarxiv.org/n3hrf/) titled "Retooling to Advance Scientifically Rigorous and Relevant School-based Educational Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic." Kathleen Lane, lead author of the retooling paper, will provide an introduction. Then you will have two opportunities to go into one of three breakout rooms to discuss current concerns, suggestions, and resources related to one of the following three broad topics: 
Room 1: How do I use this time to re-think my programmatic lines of inquiry with attention to new questions and issues that have arisen due to COVID-19? (led by Dr. Drew) 
Room 2: How do I disseminate my work when my study fell apart? (led by Dr. Cabell) 
Room 3: In the time of COVID-19, how do I conceptualize future studies? (led by Dr. Lane) 

Power steering committee members will be taking notes in each of the breakout sessions, and an overview of the discussions will be posted on the POWER website in December. 

We hope to see you there! Follow this link to sign yourself up!
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I am someone who has not typically embraced social media; I held on to my flip phone an uncomfortably long amount of time. But I have had a Twitter account for approximately three years, and I believe it has positively impacted my professional academic career. Here is what I have learned over the last three years.
 
If you are new to Twitter, I highly encourage you to find a colleague who is an experienced Twitter user and have them provide you some initial tips and advice. Learning how to block tweets containing particular words or phrases was very important for me. This allowed me to filter out certain aspects of current events that, while important, are not why I am on Twitter. People also have different opinions about how best to keep tweets or threads that have really critical or important information. For example, early on I found a thread from a highly respected researcher about academic writing tips. I knew I would want to refer to this often, so I direct-messaged the thread to myself. This works for me, but there might be better ways to do this. Get advice from experts!
 
Be selective about who you choose to follow. I followed very few people for the first 2-3 months, only following academics, scientists, and educators whose research was directly related to my own. I looked at who they were following and engaging with on Twitter. I started to follow organizations directly related to my line of research as well as funding agencies such as NIH and IES. Another thing I consider is the tone of responses.  I personally appreciate spirited discussions but don’t like pompousness, so I take this into consideration when following (and unfollowing) people.
 
One of the primary advantages of Twitter for me is hearing about new research. In a way, Twitter can serve a similar purpose as a conference. I often hear about new research results months prior to seeing it in journal. I have also connected with colleagues that I have never met in person via Twitter; after a few positive Twitter exchanges, I now feel comfortable contacting them directly to ask questions about their research findings. Also, when I have posted information about my own research, Twitter colleagues have posted suggestions for other authors or lines of research that I had overlooked.
 
Having “twitter friends” is also amazing when you attend a conference. In the past two years, I have connected with people in person that I have been conversing with for years on Twitter. I have also noted researchers finding dinner dates and writing buddies at conferences simply by tweeting that they were at a particular conference and were looking for company. For young/new faculty in particular, or for folks attending a conference a little out of their wheelhouse, this can be an amazing resource.
 
I have not utilized Twitter to promote my own academic work as well as I should, and this is a goal for 2020. Some people do this really well. Find them and try to emulate their tweets as you think about how to promote your own work.
 
One other unexpected advantage to Twitter is the feeling of solidarity with other academics. Although I love my chosen career path, it can often be hard and also really isolating at times. It makes me feel better that someone else is writing a grant at 11 o’clock at night while feeling incredibly guilty about not being fully present with their family. And if they are doing it over a glass of wine, as I often do, it’s even better! But I also love to see academics that are very prolific and highly respected tweet about leisure time-- books they are reading, museums worth seeing, trips they are taking (or planning to take post-COVID times). It makes me feel like pursuing extracurricular activities is an okay thing to do during my academic career as well.
 
Many POWER members have Twitter accounts. I encourage you to seek them out and follow them. It’s a great way to both support our members as well as learn something about their research in the process. (Also make sure to follow POWER at @poWOMENer!)
 
There are many articles written about the benefits of social media, and specifically Twitter, and here are a few links that I particularly enjoyed:
 
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2016/10/19/how-academics-can-use-twitter-most-effectively-essay
 
https://blogs.plos.org/scicomm/2019/06/18/a-nifty-guide-for-academics-on-using-twitter/
 
https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/ten-tips-tweeting-research-academic
 
 

The professional development committee has been working on putting together resources that we know and love. That isn’t quite done yet, but we thought that in this time of COVID-19, there would be interest in COVID-19 related resources. Here they are!
 
These resources were gathered from our Steering Committee members as resources they have found helpful to them. They will likely not all be of interest, or all right for you, but we hope this list might bring you some needed information/support during the time. We haven’t individually team-vetted each resource, so normal disclaimers apply.
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National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity 
https://www.facultydiversity.org/
Professional tools, mentoring, and support for being successful in the Academy, with a specific page dedicated to COVID-19 resources.

Academic Woman Amplified Podcast by Dr. Cathy Mazak
 https://www.cathymazak.com/podcast/
The podcast for academic women who want to write and publish more while rejecting the culture of overwork in academia, with recent attention paid to what to do during the pandemic.

Mirya Holman's Aggressive Winning Scholars newsletter
https://miryaholman.substack.com/
A weekly newsletter focused on being successful in academia, which recently has been focused on being successful as an academic in the time of COVID-19.

The Professor Is In website, blog, podcast
General website: http://theprofessorisin.com/
 
COVID-19 specific blogs/resources:
https://theprofessorisin.com/category/covid19/
Crowdsourced information, advice, and resources for managing your career (both in and outside of academia) generally as well as during COVID-19.

AERA Virtual Research Learning Series
https://www.aera.net/Professional-Opportunities-Funding/AERA-Virtual-Research-Learning-Series2020
Live or on-demand access to online professional learning workshops on relevant research and academic writing topics with scholars across country as instructors.
 

Virtual Coaching for Graduate Students and Academics: Teaching Academia
https://www.youtube.com/c/LeighAHall/featured
 
YouTube Channel with a library of videos to support graduate students and academics with relevant and timely content on navigating academia in the time of COVID-19.