• What is Design-based Research (DBR)?
• How does DBR differ from other approaches?
• How did DBR get started?
• What are the benefits of DBR?
• What are some critical perspective?

What are the benefits of DBR?

The benefits of DBR include

• Practical contribution

Design-based Research usually is problem-driven. Researchers seek not only to understand, document and interpret but rather to change and improve educational practice and opportunity. Research results that consider the role of social context and have better potential for influencing educational practice, tangible products, and programs that can be adopted elsewhere (Barab & Squire, 2004).

• Theoretical contribution in authentic contexts

Design-based research, as conceived by Ann Brown (1992), was introduced with the expectation that researchers would systemically adjust various aspects of the designed context so that each adjustment served as a type of experimentation that allowed the researchers to test and generate theory in authentic contexts. And research results that are validated through the consequences of their use, providing consequential evidence or validity (Messick, 1992).

• Better ties between theory and practices and between researchers and practitioners

Research should address questions of genuine interest to educators and the findings should also be presented in a way that is useful to practitioners (Reeves, 2000). Design-based studies take place in situ and rely on the active input and participation at all four stages of practitioners. Design-based studies bring well-designed interventions (materials, artifacts, and software) and are well situated in the educational field. Indeed, very close interaction between practitioners, researchers, experts, and other stakeholders is essential.

• Improve and generate evidence-based claims about learning

Researchers are finding themselves developing contexts, frameworks, tools, and pedagogical models to better understand emerging pedagogical theories or ontological commitments (diSessa & Cobb, 2004). In these contexts, the research moves beyond simply observing and actually involves systematically engineering these contexts in ways that allow research participants to improve practice and generate evidence-based claims about learning. The commitment to examining learning interventions in naturalistic contexts, many of which are designed and systematically changed by the researcher, necessitates the development of a methodological toolkit for deriving evidence-based claims from these contexts (Barab & Squire, 2004).

• Offer a useful methodological toolkit to those researchers committed to understanding variables within naturalistic context s

Design-based research is not so much an approach as it is a series of approaches, with the intent of producing new theories, artifacts, and practices that account for and potentially impact learning and teaching in naturalistic settings. Cobb, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble (2003) stated:

Prototypically, design experiments entail both “engineering” particular forms of learning and systematically studying those forms of learning within the context defined by the means of supporting them. This designed context is subject to test and revision, and the successive iterations that result play a role similar to that of systematic variation in experiment. (p. 9)

References