New CLOSER and CIDER checklists aim to fix broken reporting in education research

Educational interventions shape classrooms around the world, from tablet-based literacy programmes to mindfulness workshops for stressed undergraduates. Yet when researchers try to work out whether these interventions actually work, or attempt to reproduce them in a new school or university, they frequently hit a wall of missing information. Studies often omit crucial details about who took part, how the intervention was delivered, what the control condition involved, and even basic statistical procedures. A team led by Rebecca Upsher and Nicola C. Byrom at King’s College London argues that this chronic under-reporting is holding back the entire field, and they have built a solution: two new reporting checklists, known as CLOSER and CIDER, designed specifically for quantitative educational intervention research.

The problem, the researchers explain, is that the most widely used reporting standards were never designed with education in mind. The CONSORT checklist, the gold standard in health research, focuses narrowly on randomised controlled trials, whereas education researchers routinely employ quasi-experimental designs, pre-post studies, and cross-sectional surveys alongside RCTs. The TIDieR checklist, which guides the description of health interventions, is too generic to capture the distinctive features of educational interventions, such as pedagogical approach, curriculum embedding, and the relationship between instructor and student. Existing education-specific tools, including GREET, SQUIRE-EDU, and DoCTRINE, are largely confined to health, medical, and clinical education, leaving the broader educational landscape without adequate guidance.

The consequences of poor reporting are far-reaching. When intervention characteristics, population information, and analytical details go unreported, the quality, replicability, and reliability of research suffer. Researchers cannot draw meaningful comparisons between studies or synthesise findings across contexts, which undermines the evidence base that policymakers increasingly demand. Replication, a cornerstone of scientific progress, requires thorough reporting that allows interventions to be adapted for different settings while preserving fidelity to their core principles. Without it, even the most promising educational innovation remains trapped in the context where it was first tested, unable to inform practice in schools, further education colleges, or universities elsewhere.

To close this gap, the team developed the CheckList Of Standards of reporting in Education Research (CLOSER), which guides comprehensive reporting of quantitative educational intervention studies from abstract to discussion across multiple study designs, and the Checklist for Intervention Description of Education Research (CIDER), which details the precise features of educational interventions and can also serve qualitative manuscripts. The final versions contain 34 and 17 items respectively, and were forged through a rigorous five-stage process: adaptation of existing tools such as CONSORT and TIDieR, feedback from an interdisciplinary expert team spanning education, health, and psychology, a two-round modified Delphi consensus survey with international editorial board members, and final refinements.

The Delphi process revealed strong expert support for the checklists. In the first round, 28 participants rated each item on a scale from omit to essential, with CLOSER items most frequently rated as essential or desirable and every CIDER item most frequently rated as essential. No items were dropped on the basis of the quantitative ratings alone, though qualitative feedback prompted adjustments, removals, and additions. Nineteen participants returned for the second round, reviewing revised versions of the checklists, and the majority approved all items for inclusion. Participants also expressed enthusiasm for the checklists being disseminated widely, through journal author guidelines, university library resources, ethical guidelines, online platforms, and study preregistration websites.

CLOSER’s items walk researchers through the full arc of a study. It demands a structured abstract, a clear statement of the intervention’s aim, objectives, and hypotheses, and an explicit description of the study design, whether an RCT with randomisation and allocation concealment, a quasi-experiment, a pre-post study, or a cross-sectional survey. It requires researchers to report eligibility criteria at both individual and group level, recruitment periods aligned with the academic calendar, ethical clearance with reference numbers, and any changes made to methods after the study began. It also insists on transparency about outcome measures, including whether they were validated, and about sample size determination, whether through formal power calculations or the practical constraints of a fixed cohort.

Several items tackle bias head-on. Researchers must identify potential sources of bias, such as self-selection, measurement error, and confounding variables like prior academic achievement, and describe their efforts to mitigate them. Where an intervention and control condition coexist, the checklist asks for a description of their similarity and the steps taken to keep them distinct, so that observed effects can be attributed to the intervention rather than contamination between groups. Blinding, notoriously difficult in education because teachers must know what they are delivering and students often recognise a new teaching approach, is addressed with graded guidance: report who was blinded, how, and if nobody was, say so and explain why. Statistical methods, participant flow, baseline demographics, effect sizes with confidence intervals, ancillary analyses, and unintended harms all receive dedicated items.

CIDER, which slots into the intervention description section of CLOSER, drills down into the anatomy of an educational intervention itself. It asks for a succinct title capturing the intervention’s essence, its aims and intended learning outcomes, and the theoretical or empirical rationale behind its development. It requires details of who developed the intervention, who delivered it, their expertise and training, and whether participants with lived experience helped co-create it. It covers the institutional setting, from urban or rural location to student population size, the physical or virtual spaces where sessions took place, timing and duration relative to the academic calendar, delivery modes and content, participant-to-instructor ratios, curriculum embedding, materials, attendance figures, delivery monitoring, and any modifications made mid-study, with reasons.

The authors are candid about limitations. The Delphi participants, though drawn from multiple countries and disciplines, were predominantly based in the UK, Australia, and the US, so further validation in non-English-speaking contexts is needed. Some interventions in culturally unique settings may require adaptation of the checklist items, and the team stresses that the tools are designed with flexibility in mind, allowing researchers to tailor items to the macro, meso, and micro realities of their educational contexts. They also note that educational intervention research frequently underreports race and ethnicity, and that more complete, uniform descriptions of participants and interventions could help the field confront educational disparities rather than inadvertently perpetuate them.

Ultimately, the team frames CLOSER and CIDER as foundations rather than finished solutions. Checklists alone cannot raise reporting standards; they must be endorsed by journals, championed by institutions, and embraced by researchers, and their real-world impact now needs evaluation. The checklists also promote evidence-informed rather than merely evidence-based practice, encouraging educators to adapt interventions to their own contexts and then report on the results. If the field takes up these tools, the researchers argue, educational intervention research could become more transparent, more replicable, and far more useful to the teachers, policymakers, and students who depend on it, turning a fragmented literature into a coherent, cumulative evidence base for improving education worldwide.

Subject of Research: Development of reporting checklists for quantitative educational intervention research

Article Title: Improving reporting standards in quantitative educational intervention research: introducing the CLOSER and CIDER checklists

Article References: Upsher, R., Dommett, E., Carlisle, S., Conner, S., Codina, G., Nobili, A., & Byrom, N. C. (2025). Improving reporting standards in quantitative educational intervention research: introducing the CLOSER and CIDER checklists. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-024-00022-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-024-00022-9

Keywords: educational interventions, reporting standards, checklists, CLOSER, CIDER, Delphi consensus, replicability, quantitative research, research methodology, evidence-based practice, education research, Improving