Design-Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground
Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13 (1):
1-14 (2004)Abstract
The emerging field of the learning sciences is one that is interdisciplinary, drawing
on multiple theoretical perspectives and research paradigms so as to build understandings
of the nature and conditions of learning, cognition, and development.
Learning sciences researchers investigate cognition in context, at times emphasizing
one more than the other but with the broad goal of developing evidence-based
claims derived from both laboratory-based and naturalistic investigations that result
in knowledge about how people learn. This work can involve the development
of technological tools, curriculum, and especially theory that can be used to understand
and support learning. A fundamental assumption of many learning scientists
is that cognition is not a thing located within the individual thinker but is a process
that is distributed across the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs,
and the activity in which the learner participates. In other words, learning, cognition,
knowing, and context are irreducibly co-constituted and cannot be treated as
isolated entities or processes.
If one believes that context matters in terms of learning and cognition, research
paradigms that simply examine these processes as isolated variables within laboratory
or other impoverished contexts of participation will necessarily lead to an incomplete
understanding of their relevance in more naturalistic settings (Brown,
1992).1 Alternatively, simply observing learning and cognition as they naturally
THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 13(1), 1–14
Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Sasha A. Barab, School of Education,
Room 2232, 201 North Rose Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405. E-mail: sbarab@indiana.edu
1This special issue is dedicated to the memory and intellectual contributions of Ann Brown, who so
clearly led theway in illuminating for the field the challenges and opportunities discussed in this issue.
occur in the world is not adequate given that learning scientists frequently have
transformative agendas. Education is an applied field, and learning scientists bring
agendas to their work, seeking to produce specific results such as engaging students
in the making of science, creating online communities for professional development,
or creating history classrooms that confront students preexisting beliefs
about race, gender, or class. As such, learning scientists have found that they
must develop technological tools, curriculum, and especially theories that help
them systematically understand and predict how learning occurs. Such design research
offers several benefits: 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; and research results that are
validated through the consequences of their use, providing consequential evidence
or validity (Messick, 1992). However, participating in local educational practices
places researchers in the role of curriculum designers, and implicitly, curriculum
theorists who are directly positioned in social and political contexts of educational
practice (both global and local) and who are accountable for the social and political
consequences of their research programs.
Increasingly, learning scientists are finding themselves developing contexts,
frameworks, tools and pedagogical models consistent with and to better understand
emerging pedagogical theories or ontological commitments (see diSessa &
Cobb, this issue). In these contexts, the research moves beyond simply observing
and actually involves systematically engineering these contexts in ways that allow
us to improve and generate evidence-based claims about learning. The commitment
to examining learning 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. One such methodology that has grown in application is that
of design experimentation or design-based research, frequently traced back to
the work of Ann Brown (1992) and Alan Collins (1992).
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)
They further suggested that design-based research has a number of common
features, including the fact that they result in the production of theories on learning and teaching, are interventionist (involving some sort of design), take place in naturalistic
contexts, and are iterative. Design-based research is not simply a type of
formative evaluation that allows learning scientists to better understand the ecological
validity of theoretical claims generated in the laboratory. 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 naturalistic contexts.
Although design-based research has the potential to offer a useful methodological
toolkit to those researchers committed to understanding variables within
naturalistic contexts, there are many unresolved questions that we as a community
must address if our assertions are going to be deemed credible and trustworthy
to others. Some questions are: What are the core foci of design-based research
and what delineates it from other forms of research? What counts as
reasonable and useful warrants for advancing assertions investigated through this
type of research? What are the boundaries of a naturalistic context? How do we
control researcher bias in selecting evidence, in reporting observations, and in developing trustworthy claims? How do we understand the contextuality of
reserach claims generated in situ and use them to inform broader practice? In the
following, we begin the process of responding to these questions, a process that
is taken up in greater detail through the core articles and commentaries that comprise
this special issue and that we hope will be taken up over the next decade by
our colleagues.
