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

The study focuses on advanced anode materials that store lithium through conversion and alloying reactions. Unlike graphite, the conventional anode material used in many commercial lithium-ion batteries, these materials can accommodate much larger quantities of lithium. That greater storage capacity makes them attractive for electric vehicles, portable electronics and grid-scale energy storage. However, they can also undergo substantial structural and mechanical changes during operation, creating challenges that have limited their practical use.

Activation is one of the most difficult behaviors to understand. In affected electrodes, the measured capacity initially decreases and then increases gradually over subsequent cycles. This delayed recovery prevents the battery from immediately using the full amount of lithium that the active material should theoretically store. It can also expose the electrode to prolonged mechanical and chemical stresses, potentially weakening its structure and reducing long-term reliability. Although activation has been observed in many high-capacity materials, its physical origin has remained uncertain.

A research team led by Fangxi Xie and Mingmei Wu of Sun Yat-sen University in China, working with Shengfu Tong of Jinhua Advanced Research Institute and David Kisailus of the University of California, Irvine, has now connected activation directly to particle size. The researchers compared electrodes made from particles approximately 500 nanometers across with electrodes composed of much smaller particles, about 65 nanometers in size. Their results, published in Nano Research on July 2, 2026, show that large and small particles can follow fundamentally different lithiation pathways.

The larger particles displayed pronounced activation during cycling, while the smaller particles showed little or no comparable behavior. To determine why, the researchers tracked characteristic elements within the electrodes at different stages of operation. Their observations indicated that the electrolyte, the medium through which lithium ions move, could penetrate the small-particle electrode relatively quickly. This rapid access allowed lithium to reach more of the active material without a prolonged delay. In the larger particles, however, electrolyte access to the interior was significantly slower, creating a bottleneck during the early cycles.

The team’s analysis revealed that the delay is not simply a matter of electrolyte diffusion. Instead, it is closely related to the way lithiation advances through a particle. In a core-shell reaction mode, lithium first reacts with the outer region, forming a lithiated shell around an incompletely lithiated core. As this shell develops, it can expand relative to the original material. The surrounding, still-unreacted core constrains that expansion, generating compressive stress within the lithiated outer layer.

That stress acts as a brake on further electrochemical transformation. As lithium attempts to move inward from the shell toward the core, the accumulated compressive stress slows transport and makes continued lithiation increasingly difficult. In a large particle, the lithium must travel through a comparatively thick shell before the reaction reaches the center. The stress-induced resistance therefore persists for a longer period, producing the gradual capacity recovery characteristic of activation. The battery may eventually access more of the particle, but only after repeated cycling relieves or reorganizes the barriers to transport.

For the small particles, the same stress effect is much less influential. Their reduced dimensions shorten the distance that lithium must travel and limit the extent of stress accumulation in the lithiated shell. Faster electrolyte penetration and easier inward lithiation allow a greater fraction of the active material to participate earlier in the battery’s operation. As a result, these electrodes can reach stable cycling behavior without the prolonged activation period observed in their larger-particle counterparts.

To establish this explanation, the researchers combined direct experimental observations with finite-element simulations and electrochemical kinetic analyses. The simulations modeled how stress develops as the reaction front moves through a particle, while the kinetic studies examined how that stress influences lithium transport and reaction rates. Together, the results support a unified picture in which particle size controls the balance between reaction progress, diffusion and mechanical constraint. The work transforms activation from a largely empirical battery symptom into a predictable consequence of coupled electrochemical and mechanical processes.

The findings suggest that particle engineering could become an important strategy for improving high-capacity lithium-ion anodes. Reducing particle size may help suppress stress-induced kinetic retardation, accelerate access to the material’s full capacity and improve early-cycle performance. At the same time, particle size cannot be treated as an isolated design variable, because smaller particles can introduce other challenges, including greater surface reactivity and potentially more extensive side reactions with the electrolyte. Future battery designs will therefore need to balance transport advantages against chemical and structural stability.

By revealing how a core-shell reaction mode produces size-dependent activation, the study offers a new framework for understanding why apparently similar high-capacity materials can behave so differently in a working battery. The researchers’ results point toward a more precise approach to electrode design—one that controls not only composition, but also particle dimensions, reaction pathways and stress evolution. If these factors can be optimized together, advanced anodes may deliver their promised energy density more rapidly and retain it more reliably across the many cycles demanded by next-generation batteries.

Subject of Research: Size-dependent activation and stress-induced kinetic retardation in high-capacity lithium-ion battery anodes

Article Title: Researchers uncover the origin of activation in high-capacity lithium-ion anodes

News Publication Date: 2-Jul-2026

Web References: https://www.sciopen.com/journal/1998-0124; https://doi.org/10.26599/NR.2026.94908669

References: Nano Research, DOI: 10.26599/NR.2026.94908669

Image Credits: Nano Research, Tsinghua University Press

Keywords

Lithium-ion batteries, high-capacity anodes, battery activation, particle size, lithiation, core-shell reaction, stress-induced retardation, lithium transport, electrochemical kinetics, energy storage