Abstract
Welcome to the third issue of Volume 49 of Career Development and Transition for Exceptional Individuals. This issue offers an In Memoriam piece as well as four articles that feature the specific open practice preregistration. Two of the four articles are part of a new special series on the Propel Project, which we will feature over the next several issues. We begin with a special In Memoriam piece on Michael J. Ward, a pioneer in the field of secondary special education and transition. As you will read, Dr. Ward was highly influential in promoting self-determination and self-advocacy education for youth and young adults with disabilities. He had a range of professional roles at the state and federal levels, including work with the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). We will miss Dr. Ward and are truly grateful for his critical and groundbreaking work that has impacted the field of secondary special education and transition. His work had tremendous influence over time and will undoubtedly continue to influence our field.
Preregistration as a Featured Open Practice
The four articles included in this issue have a main feature in common: they were all preregistered prior to carrying out the study. We have promoted preregistration in previous editorials and intend to continue to prioritize these types of studies featured in the journal. As a refresher, preregistration involves a process whereby an a priori plan of the study is posted publicly on a third-party registry website (Cook et al., 2022; Lombardi et al., 2025). The idea is to post the research plan to enhance transparency and provide a systematic plan that reduces haphazard and questionable practices. At the same time, this level of transparency makes visible the research process related to how research plans can change and when study deviations happen. As a result, researchers illustrate responsible and ethical ways to handle inevitable challenges (Reich, 2021). Key elements to include in a preregistered plan are research questions, hypotheses, intended sample, recruitment plan, outcomes, other key variables (e.g., independent variable(s) in intervention research), and planned data analyses (Lombardi et al., 2025).
By posting a study preregistration to a third-party registry, your work is searchable and citable while it is in progress. There are multiple third-party registry sites to choose from, with four being most prevalent for social science researchers (Fleming et al., 2023). The third-party registry site that we recommend at CDTEI is Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io/). As a corresponding author, you may have noticed in our editorial decision letters that we do not accept manuscripts that include appendices. If you include appendices in your submission, we encourage you to revise those files as supplemental materials with your submission. You can also do this in the OSF site for which you can add supplemental materials to a project page that you can create on OSF, as well as provide access to de-identified data and codebooks.
The first two articles in this issue are the first preregistered studies that were submitted to the journal that underwent peer review. In the first article, Taconet and colleagues describe a secondary data analyses study using the National Longitudinal Transition Study 2012 dataset. Indeed, preregistration is possible even with extant data (Lombardi et al., 2023). These authors demonstrate how to conduct secondary data analyses with transparency in mind. The study was focused on daily living skills and economic hardship among youth with autism and intellectual disability and emphasized intersectionality by creating not only groups by disability category but also by race and ethnicity. The authors provide open materials as well, including annotated R code files showing the variables that were used to create the groups and how the statistical models were carried out.
In the second study, Kittelman and colleagues preregistered a scoping literature review of small-group study skills programs implemented in secondary and postsecondary settings. Importantly, the articles identified in the scoping review were relevant for youth with and without disabilities in these settings highlighting the broad need for targeted study skills instruction regardless of disability status. This study illustrates transparency in scoping reviews by sharing inclusion and exclusion criteria in the abstract screening and full article coding phases with extensive materials available on the research team’s project page on OSF.
The Propel Project as an Example of Open Practices
In addition, in this issue, we are excited to introduce the first two articles in the special series, Targeting Predictors of Transition Outcomes for Autistic Students Across General and Special Education: Implications for Efficacy and Implementation Research. The special series is guest edited by Karrie Shogren, Kara Hume, and Tyler Hicks and represents a series of papers that analyze data from the Propel Project.
The Propel Project was a 5-year, Institute of Education Sciences funded project, examining the efficacy of combining the Self-Determined Learning Model of Instruction (SDLMI) and Peer Supports (PS) on the self-determination, goal attainment, social, and transition outcomes of autistic high school students across general and special education contexts. This Special Series is unique in that both confirmatory and exploratory analyses using a range of perspectives and methods are featured. All work was guided by open science practices.
In the third article of this issue, Shogren and colleagues describe merged analysis of preregistered efficacy research questions. In the fourth article, Shogren et al. recognize the complications of implementation in randomized controlled trials in secondary transition services, conducting exploratory implementation analysis. In both articles, these exploratory analyses were preregistered, originally, and then expanded with an incremental approach to preregistering exploratory research (Dirnagl, 2020) and detailed documentation of changes that emerged as analyses proceeded (Willroth & Atherton, 2024). Subsequent papers will continue to highlight incrementally preregistered exploratory analyses that further contextualize Propel data, providing implications for secondary transition research and services. Overall, the series of papers has implications for the use of open science practices in secondary transition research as well as broader implications for methodologies that can be used to understand implementation and derive practice-based implications for comprehensive self-determination and peer support interventions, across general and special education, with a focus on implications for secondary transition services.
As we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal, we are excited to feature open practices to demonstrate the importance of transparency in secondary special education and transition. We hope you will find this collection of articles useful to better understand how to carry out preregistered studies. We intend to continue to prioritize the work of author teams who feature open practices. In the next issue, we will emphasize open data and open materials, two other open practices consistent with the broader Open Science movement.