Design Experiments

Design exper­i­ments are a way to bring the­ory and prac­tice together in the rich, com­plex and ever chang­ing envi­ron­ment of the class­room. The dif­fi­culty of doing so, described suc­cinctly by designer exper­i­menter Ann Brown:

The prob­lem with such design exper­i­ments is that changes made in one part of the sys­tem rever­ber­ate through­out, and one is often forced to con­dut the mul­ti­ply con­founded exper­i­ments that are a night­mare for an exper­i­men­tal psychologist.

Read­ing List

• To read
• Rec­om­mended
• You have bet­ter things to do

• Brown, A. L. (1992). Design Exper­i­ments: The­o­ret­i­cal and Method­olog­i­cal Chal­lenges in Cre­at­ing Com­plex Inter­ven­tions in Class­room Set­tings. Jour­nal Of the Learn­ing Sci­ences, 2 (2), 141 – 178.
• Collins, A. (1992). Toward a design sci­ence of edu­ca­tion. In E. Scan­lon and T. O%u2019Shea (Eds.), New direc­tions in edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy (pp. 15 – 22). Berlin, Germany:Springer.
• Disessa, A., Con­frey, J., Schauble, L., Cobb, P. and Lehrer, R. (2003). Design Exper­i­ments in Edu­ca­tional Research. Edu­ca­tional Researcher, 32 (1), 9 – 13.
• Edel­son, D. C. (2002). Design Research: What We Learn When We Engage in Design. Jour­nal of the Learn­ing Sci­ences, 11 (1), 105 – 121.
• Reeves., T.C. (2000). Enhanc­ing the worth of instruc­tional tech­nol­ogy research through ‘Design Exper­i­ments’ and other devel­op­ment research strate­gies. Paper pre­sented at the Annual Meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tional Research Asso­ci­a­tion, 1 – 15, New Orleans, LA, USA.
• Collins, A., Joseph, D. and Bielaczyc, K. (2004). Design Research: The­o­ret­i­cal and Method­olog­i­cal Issues. Jour­nal of the Learn­ing Sci­ences, 13 (1), 15 – 42.
• Barab, S. and Squire, K. (2004). Design-Based Research: Putting a Stake in the Ground, Jour­nal of the Learn­ing Sci­ences, 13 (1) 1 – 14.
• Cobb, P. Con­frey, J. diSessa, A. Lehrer, R. and Schauble, L. (2003). Design Exper­i­ments in Edu­ca­tional Research. Edu­ca­tional Researcher, 32 (1), 9 – 13.
• Gorard, S. Roberts, K. and Tay­lor, C. (2004). What kind of crea­ture is a design exper­i­ment? British Edu­ca­tional Research Jour­nal, 30 (4), 577 – 590.
• Sloane, F. C. and Gorard, S. (2003). Explor­ing Mod­el­ing Aspects of Design Exper­i­ments Edu­ca­tional Researcher, 32 (1), 29 – 31.
• Béguin, P. (2003). Design as a mutual learn­ing process between users and design­ers. Inter­act­ing with Com­put­ers, 15 (5), 709 – 730.