Conference Paper: AERA 2008
This paper continues a dialogue about the purposes and processes of design research as called for by Dede (2004) among others (Kelly, 2004; O’Donnell, 2004). He seeks discussion amongst design researchers in order to come to an accepted set of standards or values that describe what impact we want our research to have on improvements in education. Continuing this dialogue at AERA’s Design and Technology SIG, we, the authors, hope to include other interested parties that share similar concerns thereby expanding the diversity of voices in the discussion. Evaluators of educational designs, instructional designers, learning scientists, or design thinking educators all face similar challenges when attempting to support claims of learning improvements based on innovative design interventions.
Design research is a pre-paradigmatic form of inquiry in education in which learning performances are supported through the design of innovative environments. While a possibly burgeoning community of design researchers has published their thoughts about this type of work in recent years, the community continues to clarify and articulate how the inclusion of design can be used to support claims about learning and student performance (Kelly, Lesh, & Baek, in press). This paper will review the issues raised by one of its critical friends, Dede (2004). His argument that design research is “overmethodologized” is used as an initial descriptive framework that functions as a lens to analyze models of design research. The study examines process models offered in the design research literature in order to address the following question: In what ways do design research process models yield insights on how claims about learning are supported?
Comments