Education Design Research: Design, Evaluation, and Implementation

In the current module of the design-based research course I am taking this semester, we have been focusing on three key tasks: design, evaluation and implementation. Design is (obviously!) an essential aspect of design-based research, but these other two tasks (evaluation and implementation) are also extremely important.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the design of a proposed project to address a real problem for the pre-service teachers I currently serve: how can I best help prepare them for the challenges of technology integration? In crafting my design, I have conducted what I think is a thorough review of the literature. Honestly, at least half of the reading I have been doing in my doctoral program for the past three years has been focused on this topic, so while I have certainly read new things this semester, I find I have been revisiting things I’ve read previously, and I find that I am synthesizing from many sources, seeing how the pieces fit together, and designing a way to address this problem.

Image by US Department of Education [CC BY 2.0]

Education Design Research - Analysis and Exploration

Image by Charlottes Photo Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

I am currently taking a course entitled "Design-Based Research." Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about how to best create a design-based research project that is both realistic in scope and also helpful for my current role as a teacher educator. Also, I am working on a sort of guided study project concurrently, and I am finding much overlap between these two projects. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around in my mind right now, so as I am reflecting on my work over the past few weeks, I will try to distill them into a few key themes.

Getting Started with Education Design Research

This semester I am taking Education Design Research (EDR) as a research elective for my doctoral work. While I had heard of EDR before as a methodology, I really had never learned too much about it, so this course is is a great opportunity to learn more. EDR is also known as design-based research (DBR). This terminology may be more familiar for some, as it is sometimes used in other fields beyond education. I am fascinated by this approach so far, and I am interested in learning more!

The text we are using for this course is by McKinney and Reeves (2012), and I found their definition for EDR helpful; they describe this methodology as “a genre of research in which the iterative development of solutions to practical and complex educational problems also provides the context for empirical investigation, which yields theoretical understanding that can inform the work of others” (p. 7). The basic idea of EDR, then, is to develop an intervention to address a particular problem in education, while at the same time also generating theoretical understanding of the situation. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods can be used, depending on the nature of the research question, and from the reading I have done so far, EDR seems to be one way to make mixed-methods research a reality. (There is some contention about the used of both quantitative and qualitative methods in the same study in education; I can not speak to weather this is the case in all disciplines.)

Taking this as an introduction for the uninitiated into the idea of EDR, I feel that I should say that am not fully certain about just what this approach looks like in practice. I have looked at several examples of EDR studies, and it seems like there is a wide variety among them. So…a few parts are still a bit muddy for me.