 Hello everyone, my name is Pedro Bin and in this lightning talk I will present a definition of pre-registration and then I will explain the importance of this practice in the context of knowledge production and finally I will suggest some extra materials for you to learn more about pre-registration. First of all I would like to start by presenting a working definition of the practice so pre-registration is a permanent time-stamped record of a research plan. In other words, this practice consists in documenting the methodological and statistical decisions involved in the design of a study and as the prefix pre-suggests this documentation must occur prior to any data collection or analysis and must be submitted to a public repository. This is a very brief definition, however it highlights the main features of pre-registration. So a pre-registration it is time-stamped, it is permanent, it is publicly available, sometimes it is available after a period of embargo, it details the methodology of a study, it presents a statistical analysis plan and it occurs prior to data collection or data analysis. Having this definition in mind some of you might be thinking why should I pre-register my study? This is an important question indeed because pre-registration is not one more redundant step in the research cycle. On the contrary, this practice is a pragmatic tool for improving the robustness of scientific results due to its potential of reducing the occurrence of three well-known problems in the scientific field. Publication bias, analytical flexibility and the confusion between exploratory and confirmatory research. Publication bias also known as the file-draw problem refers to the fact that more studies are conducted than published and there is a preference for publishing positive results. Thus, the peer-reviewed literature is biased towards positive and novel findings. Analytical flexibility also known as p-hacking refers to the researcher's degrees of freedom under use of the statistical procedures and data transformation as well as on the selective report of confirmatory results. Consequently, research outcomes may be misleading due to the possible presence of type 1 or type 2 errors. The false positives and false negatives respectively. And finally, the confusion between exploratory and confirmatory research is dangerous to the scientific enterprise in the long run. Reporting exploratory studies as they were confirmatory studies prevents the self-correctness process of science and promotes a distorted model of science. And considering such problems often present in the research cycle, the practice of documenting the methodological decisions of a study before the data collection or analysis has the potential to reduce publication bias to avoid analytical flexibility and to distinguish exploratory from confirmatory research. And by mitigating the aforementioned problems, pre-registration can improve rigor and reproducibility rates of the studies. And if you are interested in how pre-registration can benefit your own research in the education field, I recommend you reading an article written by Brian Mosec, Charles Eversall, Alexander DeHavne and David Meller entitled The Pre-registration Revolution. This is an important reference if you want to know more about the practice and if you want to understand the implications of this practice to your own research. And also, I recommend watching a video available in the Center for Open Science YouTube channel, The What, Why and How of Pre-registration. In this video, Alexander DeHavne and Sarah Bowman provide a step-by-step guide to pre-register your research in the Open Science framework, a platform developed by the COS. And for sure, if you want, you can mail me to know more about pre-registration. So thank you very much for listening to me and I hope we have a great event.