Educsite

Design-Based Research Collective. (2003). Design-based research: An emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 5-8.

An excellent paper describing 'Design Based Research Methods' which is an approach to studying learning intervention that takes a holistic view of learning, thus taking the context and the learning intervention (program) into account. The paper describes 5 central characteristics of 'Design Based Research Methods':

1. The aim of the research must be to design/construct an effective learning environment as well as to develop a theory of learning.
2. The research should happen through a design/ redesign cycle.
3. The research should lead to useful theories about the implication of the work.
4. The research must be relevant to authentic settings and give information about success, failure and any more subtle interactions that enhance or flaw the design.
5. The development of the research accounts need to use methods that allow documentation that connect how it is done to the practicality of doing it.

Major problems for research in Education are the fact that we often lack either informative theories that relate them to actual practice or that the research itself is not scientific/empirical or fundamentally flawed. The Design Based Research Approach attempts to deal with these problems and attempts to move education forward by documenting effective innovative techniques and why they work.