Design-based Research - History and Controversy

History and Controversy

Design-based research methodologies are often viewed as "non-scientific" by circles in the post-positivist learning research tradition due to the ongoing changes and interactions that are made by researchers who neither do purely empirical observational ethnographic research or purely empirical experimental research in which "fixed and isolated variables" will be measured and not tinkered with mid-experiment but rather use "quasi-experimental methods" in which the experimental design is always going through changes and modifications during the middle of "experimental" interventions. The method was first proposed as 'design-experiments' as Allan Collins in 1990 and 'design experiments' by Ann Brown in 1992. Collins originally proposed design-experiments as contributing to a design science, like aeronautics or artificial intelligence, rather than towards analytic science, such as physics or psychology. Ann Brown famously defended these “quasi-experimental” methods in her final, seminal deathbed paper which outlines the rationale for design-experiments primarily as a way to develop new theories and hypotheses, explicitly suggesting design experiments were for exploratory research only, and this limited applicability was echoed in the 2002 US National Research Council Report on Scientific Methods in Education.

In the mid-1990s, a group called the National Design Experiment Consortium was founded by the late Jan Hawkins, then of Educational Development Corporation, to refine the method. In 1999, Christopher Hoadley founded the Design-Based Research Collective, funded by the Spencer Foundation, and coined the modern term for the method. In 2000, Charles Desforges famously called design experiments 'neither designed, nor experiments'. Special issues exploring the methods, their epistemology, and models for rigor came out in Educational Researcher (2003), Educational Psychologist (2004), Journal of the Learning Sciences (2004), and Educational Technology (2005). Currently, researchers debate whether design-based research methods are primarily useful as an exploratory research method geared towards producing designed artifacts, or whether the method are valid for testing robust social science theories that are contingent on designed artifacts or interventions.