Design Research in Education

A Practical Guide for Early Career Researchers

Arthur Bakker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351329415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Design Research in Education is a practical guide containing all the information required to begin a design research project. Providing an accessible background to the methodological approaches used in design research as well as addressing all the potential issues that early career researchers will encounter, the book uniquely helps the early career researcher to gain a full overview of design research and the practical skills needed to get their project off the ground. Based on extensive experience, the book also contains multiple examples of design research from both undergraduate and postgraduate students, to demonstrate possible projects to the reader.

With easy to follow chapters and accessible question and response sections, Design Research in Education contains practical advice on a wide range of topics related to design research projects including:

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• The theory of design research, what it entails, and when it is suitable

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• The formulation of research questions

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• How to structure a research project

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• The quality of research and the methodological issues of validity and reliability

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• How to write up your research

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• The supervision of design research.

Through its theoretical grounding and practical advice, Design Research in Education is the ideal introduction into the field of design based research and is essential reading for bachelor's, master's and PhD students new to the field, as well as to supervisors overseeing projects that use design research.

Part I

Theory and practice

Part I provides a theoretical background of design research and practical advice on how to conduct it, with Chapter 1 looking into what design research entails. Chapter 2 sketches design research’s multiple historical roots. A first intermezzo is a hypothetical dialogue between two research approaches, randomized controlled trials and design research. Chapter 3 is about design principles, conjecture maps, and hypothetical learning trajectories, followed by another dialogic intermezzo summarizing the differences and similarities between working with design principles or hypothetical learning trajectories. Research questions that are typical of design research are discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 looks at the quality of research in terms of validity and reliability. Chapter 6 contains my recent ideas on argumentative grammars for design research to clarify what design research can and cannot claim. Writing up your research is the topic of Chapter 7, and Chapter 8 addresses the supervision of design research. Many chapters contain Question and Response (Q&R) textboxes, which are drawn from questions that were asked during the workshops I gave on design research.

Chapter 1

What is design research in education?¹

Summary

This chapter is an introduction to design research. After a very brief characterization, it compares design research with related research approaches such as experiments, action research, and lesson studies. The chapter ends with a list of five characteristics of design research.

Design research in a nutshell

Most educational research describes or evaluates education as it currently is. Some educational research analyzes education as it was. Design research, however, is about education as it could be or even as it should be. Perhaps you say, like Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a dream,” and try to contribute to, say, more equitable education. Design research is the science fiction, or rather science faction, among the research approaches.

Typically, design researchers want to solve a problem; they see the potential of new technology for teaching and learning, or argue for the need to help learners prepare for skills increasingly needed in the future. The type of learning they envision cannot yet be observed in naturalistic settings; hence new settings have to be engineered in which the intended learning processes can be researched and improved. The focus of design research on what is possible rather than actual fits Vygotsky’s (1987) view on teaching: “The teacher must orient his work not on yesterday’s development in the child but on tomorrow’s” (p. 211; emphasis in the original).

Design research in education is research in which the design of new educational materials (e.g., computer tools, learning activities, or a professional development program) is a crucial part of the research. McKenney and Reeves (2012) characterize educational design research as a blend of “scientific investigation with systematic development and implementation of solutions to educational problems” (title page). Plomp (2010) defined educational design research

as the systematic study of designing, developing and evaluating educational interventions, – such as programs, teaching-learning strategies and materials, products and systems – as solutions to such problems, which also aims at advancing our knowledge about the characteristics of these interventions and the processes to design and develop them.

(p. 9)

The adjective educational in front of design research helps to distinguish it from design research in human-computer interaction, industrial engineering, architecture, and similar disciplines. However, in the context of educational research most people leave out the adjective, and so do I if I do not expect confusion with other disciplines.

In design research, design and research are intertwined: The design is research based and the research is design based. The design of learning environments is further interwoven with the testing or developing of theory. The theoretical basis and outcomes distinguish design research from studies that aim to design educational materials through iterative cycles of testing and improving prototypes.

Design research has been proposed as a potential solution to a variety of problems that have persisted throughout the history of education. One problem is that the development of new educational approaches is often not based on the knowledge base available from research, and thus does not benefit from the most recent insights. Researchers saw how the quality of design could be improved by basing design on research. Another problem is that most research provided little insight that practitioners could benefit from. A common concern is that knowledge based on research carried out in laboratory situations was of little use for the reality in schools, because messy educational settings are so different from laboratory situations in which conditions can be controlled. Chapter 2 further summarizes the history of the various ways in which scholars tried to resolve such problems and how these solutions led to variations of design research in the specific contexts in which these scholars operated.

Due to its diverse history in various countries design research is known under various names. Other terms for similar approaches are:

• developmental or development research (Freudenthal, 1988; Gravemeijer, 1994; Lijnse, 1995; Romberg, 1973; Van den Akker, 1999)
• design experiments or design experimentation (Brown, 1992; Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003; Collins, 1990, 1992)
• design based research is the name used by Hoadley (2002) and the Design Based Research Collective (2003); see the special issue in Educational Researcher (2003)
• educational design research (McKenney & Reeves, 2012; Plomp & Nieveen, 2013; Van den Akker, Gravemeijer, McKenney, & Nieveen, 2006)
• formative experiments (Reinking & Bradley, 2008).

Related but slightly different approaches are design based implementation research (Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011) and formative interventions (Engeström, 2011). Chapter 2 addresses the history of these terms as well as subtle differences between these approaches.

A key characteristic of design research is that educational ideas for student or teacher learning are formulated in the design, but can be adjusted during the empirical testing of these ideas – for example if a design idea does not quite work as anticipated. In most other interventionist research approaches, design and testing are cleanly separated. Elaboration of this and other characteristics follows later in this chapter.

Textbox 1.1

• Question: Design of new instructional materials is a key part of my research. Does this mean I do design research?
• Response: It depends. If you use your research to improve your design according to scientific standards, and use your design to conduct scientific research, then you do design research. However, if you design in an intuitive way without basing it on research or if you do not operate in the spirit of the characteristics at the end of this chapter, then I would not call it design research. I should stress, however, that design research is an evolving genre of research approaches without strict boundaries.

What is design?

It is worth spending a few words on what design researchers mean by design. You may initially think of how buildings are designed by architects, or the design of your mobile phone, clothes, or furniture. Most people will probably think of the design of objects, but one can also design working procedures, for example in factories. In a management context, Argyris (1996) defined designs as “specifications of actions to be taken (often specified in a sequence) to achieve the intended consequences” (p. 396). In the context of design based school improvement, Mintrop (2016) characterized design as follows:

An intervention design consists of a sequence of activities that together or in combination intervene in existing knowledge, beliefs, dispositions, or routines in order to prompt new learning that leads to new practices.

(p. 133)

The word design stems from the Latin designare, which means “to mark out.” In dictionaries you will find many definitions such as “to make or draw plans for something, for example clothes or buildings” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.).

So the term design is also used for more abstract or process-like entities. In education, not only educational materials such as computer tools, tasks, or learning environments are designed, but one can also design how students or teachers are expected to communicate – for example by means of suggesting ground rules for communication (Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999). As Mintrop (2016) wrote with John Hall:

The purpose of design development is to discover an ensemble of tools, materials, tasks, organizational structures, and any other activities that are apt to set in motion a process of learning that improves on a focal problem of practice. This ensemble is the intervention, the final product of a given design development effort.

(p. 219)

Textbox 1.2

• Question: What is the difference between teaching methods, learning environments, learning ecologies, etc.?
• Response: There are indeed many terms for somewhat similar things that can be designed. The different terms typically emphasize different aspects, from micro- to macro-scales. For example, psychological studies often focus on tasks and learning activities with an interest in what happens within students. Tasks are the thing you ask a student to do. The term learning activity is ambiguous: It is both used for tasks and for the activity that learners engage in when they do particular tasks. Domain-specific pedagogy, or didactics, is interested in learning trajectories from some starting point to particular learning goals; then terms such as instructional sequence, teaching-learning strategy, unit, module, or teaching methods are used. When people write “learning environment” or “learning ecology” they want to emphasize that learning and teaching take place in a social and cultural setting that is intricately connected with what happens (or does not happen).

Methodology or method?

Is design research a methodology? I would say no. Methodology is the science of methods. “Method” here refers to the systematic way of doing things. The suffix “-logy” makes the study of what comes in front of it scientific: Psychology studies the psyche and sociology studies social phenomena. “Method” prescribes the “how”; “-logy” explains the “why.”

To clarify what design research is, it is useful to make a distinction between methodology, research approach, and research methods. Particular common approaches to doing research are called research approaches or strategies (Denscombe, 2014). Confusingly, many people also call these methodologies. Then within research approaches or strategies (e.g., observation, survey), researchers use particular methods or techniques (e.g., video-recording, eye tracking, interview, questionnaire). “Method” typically refers to how you collect (and then analyze) your data (see Table 1.1).

Design research experts I interviewed agree that design research is neither methodology nor method. It is something in between. Design research is an approach in the sense that it can be compared with action research or experiment. However, it is also more general than particular strategies such as survey, case study, or experiment in the sense that within design research these strategies can be used. This is the reason that some experts prefer to call design research a methodological framework rather than a strategy. It is a genre of flexibly using existing research approaches for the purpose of gaining design based insights and research-based designs. For example, it is possible that within a design study (a design research project) you first use a survey to do a problem or needs analysis, do a case study of a teacher using your design, and use evaluation to identify learning effects. Design researchers typically need to learn about several research approaches, in particular survey, case study, and experiment. If you do not yet know about these, it would be wise to get acquainted with them. References to some well-known books on these app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• Part I Theory and practice
• Part II Examples
• Appendix: Further resources
• Index