Concretization of design ideas in the context of educational technology design
the Journal of Instructional Science, (forthcoming)Abstract
Learning by design (LBD) is a pedagogical approach applied in various disciplines, in which students internalize concepts by designing and developing artefacts which embody them. The context of this study is a graduate-level course in which the LBD approach was used to help graduate students in education deepen their understanding about socio-constructivist pedagogical ideas. Our research aims to characterize the learning processes of these students by examining technology-enhanced curriculum modules they designed in the course. An outcome of a previous study showed that students tended to stay at an abstract level and had a difficulty to translate their pedagogical rationales into concrete features in the modules they designed. In the current study we explore the nature of this difficulty, and examine the degree to which refined versions of the pedagogical model which the course was based upon supported students to overcome this challenge. The artefacts of 14 groups were analyzed according to the degree to which they represented mature learning environments – a set of activities with clear instructions for learners. Outcomes indicate that as we improved the pedagogical model to attend to student challenges (such as coping with the open-ended nature of the task and making complex design-decisions with limited peer-feedback), we also better supported them in developing the skill to concretize their design ideas and translate these ideas into features in mature learning environments. We view concretization as a crucial skill for novices to progress in a design knowledge novice-expert continuum.