What kind of creature is a design experiment?

Abstract

This article considers the emerging method of design experimentation, and its developing use in educational research. It considers the extent to which design experiments are different from other, more established, methods and the extent to which elements of established methods can be adapted for use in conjunction with them. One major issue to be addressed before the metaphors and methods of design experiments can be fully accepted is that they assume the combination of different forms of data from different sources. How this combination takes place is, as yet, unresolved. The article, therefore, looks at similar problems also faced in`new' political arithmetic, research syntheses and ®eld trials to see how lessons learned in these approaches could help in the development of the design ®eld.

From Geocentrism to Allocentrism: Teaching the Phases of the Moon in a Digital Full-Dome Planetarium

“…Our goal is to develop and test the educational scenario previously described, allowing it to evolve through several implementation cycles. To reach this goal, we chose a methodological approach that goes by several different names, such as design experiment (Cobb et al 2003), design science (Gorard et al 2004), design-based research (Design-Based Research Collective 2003), or design studies (Shavelson et al 2003) (see also National Research Council 2002). Shavelson et al (2003) describe design study as a cyclic methodology that focuses on the learning process, that is interventionist and collaborative by nature, that is willing to influence the broader institutional context where it is applied, that puts emphasis on the effectiveness of the educational interventions, and that is willing to improve theory through practice.…”

“…The first approach, deductive, reviews relevant research literature to come up with a combination of theoretical and practical solutions to design the teaching intervention. The second approach, inductive, is based on the results of successive implementations and testing of the intervention in its Bnatural^setting (Van der Maren 1996; Gorard et al 2004). The combination of these two approaches allows the conception, testing, and improvement of a teaching intervention in its natural context, all the while allowing its theoretical foundation to evolve with new hypotheses and new ideas emerging from the intervention, thus enriching further implementations of the intervention through informing cycles (Design-Based Research Collective 2003).…”

Measuring is More Than Assigning Numbers

“…Analysts might reasonably use their a priori subjective judgement of the null hypothesis being true to substitute for p(H). In which case the new p-value is an estimate of how far that subjective view of the null hypothesis might be affected by the new empirical evidence (see Gorard et al 2004b). But almost none of the material published in mainstream social science research journals, follows such a procedure.…”

Constructing an evidence-base for future CALL design with ‘engineering power’: The need for more basic research and instrumental replication

“…Design-based research (also referred to as design experiments and design research) refers to an approach in which 'local' theories of learning and teaching are tested and refined through iterative cycles of design and evaluation in collaboration with end-users, i.e. learners and teachers, and gradually scaled up and rolled out for use in practice (Barab & Squire, 2004;Burkhardt & Schoenfeld, 2003;Gorard, Roberts & Taylor, 2004;Yutdhana, 2005). In other words, in addition to being transformative and practice-oriented, design-based research recognizes and values teacher cognition (see Borg, 2003;Kumaravadivelu, 1994) and is impact-oriented.…”