As I continue my course in design-based research (DBR), I still struggle with how it might actually fit into the repertoire of doctoral students. The iterative nature of DBR seems to take quite a long time, and might not have a fixed end point. It seems difficult to predict the exact number of iterations it will take to get to generalizable design principles. One thought I had is about the possibility of doing an informal version of DBR as a school site leader; the team of researcher/practitioners would be the teachers in a grade level, and their PLC meetings would be the format for hypothesizing design principles and determining how to test those principles. Minor iterations would probably occur every 2-3 weeks, and the teachers implement and revise. While I’m sure they wouldn’t consider their conclusions to be design principles, I think the strategies and recommended practices teams come up with might indeed fall into that category.
In the readings over the past month, Joseph (2004) helped me to better understand the ways in which other research approaches also study real-world learning situations, and the difference in philosophies that might make a researcher select design-based research. It seems that it’s all about the outcome; if a researcher wants design principles, they might select DBR. If they want to simply examine a phenomenon, or determine the effectiveness of a strategy without necessarily modifying the design, they would likely choose another research approach. Obrenović (2011) describes a process of DBR that I found very similar to what we learned in our Project Management class, but also talks about how DBR might use a selection of quantitative and qualitative approaches in the various stages of design in order to inform changes. As I read Anderson and Shattuck (2012), I began to wonder if the Response to Intervention (RtI) programs that we use in my district were created using design-based research. I know the interventions have been extensively tested, and I know they all have significant bodies of research about their reliability and validity, but I wonder about their genesis. As I reflected on the issues Anderson and Shattuck raise about researchers who are also the designers and implementers, it makes me think that programs such as Read 180 were probably developed by one group of people, and then validated by others. I don’t know that’s the case, but I would predict that getting a reliable rating from the What Works Clearinghouse probably precludes the designer being the researcher.
