Why Design-Based Research?

DBR can help educational researchers to “develop powerful technological tools and curricular interventions” (Barab, 2014, p. 164). Anderson and Shattuck (2012) claim that DBR is situated in real educational contexts, focuses on the design and testing of interventions, uses mixed methods, employs multiple iterations and promotes collaboration between researchers and practitioners. DBR is an evolution from design experimentation. In the early 1990s, Brown (1992) and Collins (1992) popularised design experimentation as a tool to be used in educational research, and the principles they laid out were highly relevant for this study. Brown’s (1992) rationale was that design experimentation could “transform classrooms from academic work factories to learning environments that encourage reflective practice among students, teachers and researchers” (p. 78). More recently, Cobb et al. (2003) went further in insisting that design experiments “are conducted to develop theories – that is, not merely to empirically tune ‘what works’” (p. 9) but to “target domain- specific learning processes” (ibid). This, they argued, can contribute to a “greater understanding of a learning ecology” (ibid) and provide “a means of addressing the complexity that is a hallmark of educational settings” (ibid).

There are five interrelated features of design experiments in Cobb et al.’s (2003) framework, all of which are pertinent to this study. They are as follows:

1. theory-building capacity about the process of learning and the means that are designed to support that learning;

2. a highly interventionist methodology – (research site becomes a test-bed for innovation);

3. a design generative of conditions for developing theories; 4. an iterative logic built into the design; and,

5. a capacity to operationalise as a result of theory-building (pp. 9-11).

Any study, then, that is guided by the above framework needs to work across a wide range of practices, from building theory to intervening pragmatically to reviewing and redesigning the research and its underpinning logic while at the same time ensuring that the politics of the research relationships are being sensitively built and managed.

Classrooms are, of course, complex and unpredictable places for learning. This is acknowledged by Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004), whose study of this complexity compared psychological and design experiment methodology, noting seven differences in the methodological approaches taken by both types of inquiry. Their preference for design experimentation was based on the following characteristics that they perceived it to demonstrate:

1. a capacity to make sense of the messy situation that characterises real life learning;

2. its usefulness for complex social situations like the classroom; 3. its multiple inter-dependent variables;

4. the capacity it provides to study all the variables without allocating unequal emphasis to any variable;

5. the fact that it allows flexible design revision;

6. a capacity to involve the co-participants in the study in both the research and analysis;

7. its potential for developing a profile (qualitative or quantitative) of the design in practice as distinct from supporting a simple hypothesis (pp. 20–21).

When taken together, these seven characteristics indicate a key awareness of the messiness and complexities of an inquiry that is at the same time seeking to build capacity in research participants/stakeholders. Research in schools demands that any design must have this capacity for flexibility, co-creation and the “capacity to make sense of … messy situation[s]” (pp. 20-21). In this sense, it is unlike the sort of ‘white coat science’ that allows the observer to stand at a dispassionate distance and work in the more predictable field of numbers rather than the complex field of human behaviour. It is for this reason that Collins et al.’s (2004) seven characteristics are so relevant to the design of this study, documented in this thesis.

However, no matter how many characteristics a model of research has, research plans are always fallible. Collins et al. (2004) note that the basic tension in developing a design science of education is that it can be “quite different from what the designers intended” (p. 17). The specifics may be endlessly complicated by the need to provide the participants with “constant decisions about how to proceed” at every stage (ibid). Notwithstanding the complications arising from the fact that classrooms are rich and complex hotbeds of social activity, design experiment methodology’s focus on understanding and addressing this “ecology of learning” is one that makes it suitable for this thesis. In short, the focus on learning (in all its complicated forms) in design experiment methodology influenced the decision to choose this methodology as the approach to be taken in this study.

The methodology that was used in the study was informed by Cobb’s jointly authored chapter with Kay McClain: An approach for supporting teachers’ learning in social contexts (2001). In this chapter, the authors prescribed a set of generic elements of design experiments that are relevant for all intervention research with teachers, namely:

1. Initial focus on the renegotiation of classroom norms so that teachers’ classrooms might become learning environments for the teachers themselves and their students (pp. 217–218).

2. Designing a framework for supporting teachers’ reasoning for seeking to change their current instructional practices (pp. 217–218).

3. Framing selected teaching experiments as cases both of students’ thinking and of how effectively teachers build on that thinking (p. 218).

The relevance of their methodology for this inquiry lies in the fact that their theoretical constructs were developed in the classroom and teacher development experiments’ contexts. While the context was specifically linked to the teaching of mathematics, the approaches taken are clearly generalisable across disciplinary boundaries as they focus on teaching pedagogies. Whilst this study does not work with teachers, DBR was employed based specifically on the above-mentioned generic elements and more specifically, it is useful in complex classrooms especially with the flexible and iterative research design.