Advances in Design-Based Research

Design-based research is a core methodology of the Learning Sciences. Historically rooted as a movement away from the methods of experimental psychology, it is a means to develop “humble” theory that takes into account numerous contextual effects for understanding how and why a design supported learning. DBR involves iterative refinement of both designs for learning and theory; this process is illustrated with retrospective analysis of six DBR cycles. Calls for educational research to parallel medical research has led learning scientists to strive for more specific standards about what constitutes DBR and what makes it desirable, especially regarding robustness and rigor. A recent trend in DBR involves efforts to extend the reach through scalability. These developments potentially endanger the designerly nature of DBR by orienting focus toward generalizability, meaning researchers must be vigilant in their pursuit of understanding how and why learning occurs in complex context

Designing for Immersive Technology: Integrating Art and STEM Learning

Students struggle to learn science, technology, engineering and mathematics concepts. The arts have been proposed as a means to engage students in STEM education, resulting in the idea of STEAM. This study investigates how two students in a six-week summer program solved technological and design production problems to create public service announcements for the immersive fulldome on the topic of water conservation. Qualitative data were collected, including interviews, observations, artifacts of student work and reflections. Qualitative analysis focused on integration of STEM content and practices with the arts. The study contributes to what is known about how people learn when they design for immersive media, and identify potential barriers and affordances for learning STEM through the arts

Do Loss Aversion and the Ownership Effect Bias Content Validation Procedures?

In making validity arguments, a central consideration is whether the instrument fairly and adequately covers intended content, and this is often evaluated by experts. While common procedures exist for quantitatively assessing this, the effect of loss aversion—a cognitive bias that would predict a tendency to retain items—on these procedures has not been investigated. For more novel constructs, experts are typically drawn from adjacent domains. In such cases, a related cognitive bias, the ownership effect, would predict that experts would be more loss averse when considering items closer to their domains. This study investigated whether loss aversion and the ownership effect are a concern in standard content validity evaluation procedures. In addition to including promising items to measure a relatively novel construct, framing agency, we included distractor items linked to other areas of our evaluators’ expertise. Experts evaluated all items following procedures outlined by Lawshe (1975). We found on average, experts were able to distinguish between the intended items and distractor items. Likewise, on average, experts were somewhat more likely to reject distractor items closer to their expertise. This suggests that loss aversion and the ownership effect are not likely to bias content validation procedures

Facilitating Problem Framing in Project-Based Learning

While problem solving is a relatively well understood process, problem framing is less well understood, particularly with regard to supporting students to learn as they frame problems. Project-based learning classrooms are an ideal setting to investigate how teachers facilitate this process. Using participant observation, this study investigated how teachers supported students in taking ownership over the framing of problems in a charter school that serves students who have been underserved by traditional schooling. Data include audio/video records, field notes, interviews, and student work from a nineweek project. Interaction analysis was used to examine ownership and learning over time. Analysis suggests that providing a relevant yet revisable design problem, giving instruction about design process as iterative, and problematizing a model of design process supported students in taking ownership over the framing of the problem; students were motivated to pose questions and gathered information purposefully, thereby learning in the process

How differences in interactions affect learning and development of design expertise in the context of biomedical engineering design

textAuthentic design commonly involves teams of designers collaborating on ill-structured problems over extended time periods. Nonetheless, design has been studied extensively in sequestered settings, limiting our understanding of design as process and especially of learning design process. This study addresses potential shortcomings of such studies by examining in-situ student team design. The participants of this study are three cohorts of a year-long capstone biomedical engineering design class at The University of Texas. Pilot research demonstrated advantages of a more authentic redesign task over a kit-based design task; students who chose devices to redesign were significantly better at representing perspective taking associated with customers' needs. Pilot research showed that there was no relationship between Early Efficiency (appropriate use of factual and conceptual knowledge) and Final Innovation of design products. I triangulated various methods for studying design: Qualitative research, Hierarchical Linear Modeling, and Social Network Analysis, the latter of which allowed me to generate team-level statistics of interaction (Cohesion), once I devised a practical method to account for missing data in a weighted network. Final Efficiency is a function of Early Innovation, early and late Cohesion, and team feasibility (factual and practical knowledge). Final Innovation is a function of Early Innovation, late Cohesion, and team Voice of the Customer (perspective-taking), with all relationships in both models positive. Measures of both design skills and interaction are required to explain variance in these outcomes. Narratives of team negotiation of design impasses --seemingly insurmountable barriers-- provide deeper understanding of relationships between design process and products. The case study teams spent a large percentage of their time engaged in problem scoping, but framed as engineering science rather than as engineering design. Only when they began prototyping did they transition towards being solution focused and frame the problem as engineering design. This left little time for iteration of the final design. Variance in timing of iteration may account for slight deviations of the case study teams from the statistical model. Recommendations include earlier opportunities to design and support for team collaboration. Social network analysis is recommended when learning is interactional and to support triangulation.Science and Mathematics Educatio

A review of teacher implemented scaffolding in K-12

Although scaffolding—often in the form of help from a teacher—supports students to achieve more than they can do on their own, prior reviews have not focused on the role of the teacher in scaffolding. Using a systematic review, we categorized 41 articles by mode (hard or soft) and contingent processes (ongoing diagnosis, responsiveness, fading). We found that most studies took place at an elementary level, most often in language arts, and most in an intact classroom. Additionally, the combination of hard and soft scaffolds allows teachers more time to offer soft scaffolds to students who need more support