Design-Based Research: A New Research Paradigm.

What Is Design-Based Research?

Design-based research (DBR) is a relatively new methodological strategy for studying a wide range of designs, including technology-based instructional designs. Collins, Joseph, and Bielaczyc (2004) defined DBR thus:
“Design experiments bring together two critical pieces in order to guide us to better educational refinement: a design focus and assessment of critical design elements. Ethnography provides qualitative methods for looking carefully at how a design plays out in practice, and how social and contextual variables interact with cognitive variables. Large-scale studies provide quantitative methods for evaluating the effects of independent variables on the dependent variables. Design experiments are contextualized in educational settings, but with a focus on generalizing from those settings to guide the design process. They fill a niche in the array of experimental methods that is needed to improve educational practices”.
According to Collins et al. (2004), Design-based Research intends to address several needs and issues central to the study of learning, including the following:
• The need to address theoretical questions about the nature of learning in context
• The need for approaches to the study of learning phenomena in the real world situations rather than the laboratory
• The need to go beyond narrow measures of learning.
• The need to derive research findings from formative evaluation.
Characteristics of design-based research experiments include:
• addressing complex problems in real, authentic contexts in collaboration with practitioners
• applying integrating known and hypothetical design principles to render plausible solutions
• conducting rigorous and reflective inquiry to test and refine innovative learning environments
• intertwined goals of (1) designing learning environments and (2) developing theories of learning
• research and development through continuous cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign
• research on designs that must lead to sharable theories that help communicate relevant implications to practitioners and other educational designers
• research must account for how designs function in authentic settings
Definition:
While there is an ongoing debate about what constitutes design-based research, the definition of design-based research proposed by Wang and Hannafin (2005) captures its critical characteristics:
“a systematic but flexible methodology aimed to improve educational practices through iterative analysis, design, development, and implementation, based on collaboration among researchers and practitioners in real-world settings, and leading to contextually-sensitive design principles and theories” (p. 6).
Main characteristics of design-based research:
Drawing on the literature, Wang and Hannafin (2005) proposed five basic characteristics of design-based research: “Pragmatic, Grounded, Interactive, iterative and flexible, Integrative, and Contextual” (p. 7).
First, design-based research is pragmatic because its goals are solving current real-world problems by designing and enacting interventions as well as extending theories and refining design principles.
Second, design based research is grounded in both theory and the real-world context (Wang & Hannafin, 2005).
Third, in terms of research process, design-based research is interactive, iterative and flexible.
Fourth, design-based research is integrative because researchers need to integrate a variety of research methods and approaches from both qualitative and quantitative research paradigms, depending on the needs of the research.
Fifth, design research is contextualized because research results are “connected with both the design process through which results are generated and the setting where the research is conducted” (Wang & Hannafin, 2005, p. 11).
However, the purpose of creating design-based research methodology was to move educational research from laboratories into classrooms in order to gain insight into how, when, and why innovations work in practice (The design-based research collective, 2003). Yet the focus of DBR is not on specific designs and curricula, but on how the strengths and limits of a design inform theories of learning. DBR combines quantitative and qualitative methods to view how designs work in the crucible of practice and to gain insights into how students learn in typical school contexts. The DBR Collective has identified 5 key characteristics of good design-based research:
• Goals of designing learning environments and developing theories of learning are intertwined.
• Development and research take place through continuous cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign.
• Research leads to theories that communicate relevant implications to practitioners and other designers.
• Research accounts for how designs function in authentic settings, not only documenting success or failure, but also focusing on interactions that refine our understanding of the learning issues involved.
• Research relies on methods that can document and connect process of enactment to outcomes of interest.

In conclusion, accourding to the scholars of education there are four areas where design-based research methods provide the most promise: (a) exploring the possibilities for creating novel learning and teaching environments, (b) developing theories for learning and instruction that are contextually based, (c) advancing and consolidating design knowledge, and (d) increasing our capability for education innovation.



By: Abdul