Design-Based Research

Catalog description

The Transformative Leadership project classes provide opportunities for doctorial candidates to engage in leadership-related, authentic, action-research experiences in approved settings. Balancing theory with practice, working under the mentorship of an Ed Leadership Professor and in collaboration with a superintendent or assistant superintendent, candidates will be immersed in the realities of practice and hone their research skills while solving relevant, school-based challenges. Doctoral candidates will utilize the design process in order to identify an organizational challenge, create a solution, implement, measure, and redesign as appropriate. This course has two main purposes. First, it introduces students to different design-based research methods in educational research. Second, it provides students with an intensive experience in carrying out their own design-based research studies. Through a combination of readings, lectures, demonstrations, discussions, site visits and class exercises, students will be introduced to the issues and practices associated with design-based research and how different researchers engage in this kind of work. By learning about the work of different researchers, students will also be introduced to distinct forms of design-based research in education. In their transformative learning project, students will apply what they have learned to the design and conduct of their own design-based research studies. Design-bases research is a research approach that systematically investigates teaching, learning and/or training phenomena through multiple cycles of design, development, evaluation and implementation of educational interventions (which may consist of curriculum/training interventions, systemic school programs, informal or formal teaching-learning strategies and materials, technology-based products and systems, etc.). This course will examine the history of this research approach along with related current literature, commentary and research. This form of inquiry necessarily involves foundational features of design practice as well as quantitative and qualitative research as appropriate. This course is not a substitute for coursework on quantitative or qualitative methods. It is actually intended to complement such courses. The purposes a scholar intends to achieve determine the appropriate form of inquiry.