Design-Based Research: An Emerging Paradigm for

Educational Inquiry
by The Design-Based Research Collective
The authors argue that design-based research, which blends empirical educational research with the theory-driven design of learning
environments, is an important methodology for understanding how,
when, and why educational innovations work in practice. Designbased researchers innovations embody specific theoretical claims
about teaching and learning, and help us understand the relationships
among educational theory, designed artifact, and practice. Design is
central in efforts to foster learning, create usable knowledge, and advance theories of learning and teaching in complex settings. Designbased research also may contribute to the growth of human capacity
for subsequent educational reform.

ducational researchers, policymakers, and practitioners

agree that educational research is often divorced from the
problems and issues of everyday practicea split that creates a need for new research approaches that speak directly to problems of practice (National Research Council [NRC], 2002) and
that lead to the development of usable knowledge (Lagemann,
2002). Design-based research (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992) is
an emerging paradigm for the study of learning in context through
the systematic design and study of instructional strategies and
tools. We argue that design-based research can help create and
extend knowledge about developing, enacting, and sustaining innovative learning environments.
Definitions of design experiments abound (see Bell, 2002a). We
use the phrase design-based research methods deliberately (after
Hoadley, 2002) to avoid invoking mistaken identification with experimental design, with studies of designers, or with trial teaching
methods. We propose that good design-based research exhibits the
following five characteristics: First, the central goals of designing
learning environments and developing theories or prototheories
of learning are intertwined. Second, development and research
take place through continuous cycles of design, enactment, analysis, and redesign (Cobb, 2001; Collins, 1992). Third, research on
designs must lead to sharable theories that help communicate relevant implications to practitioners and other educational designers (cf. Brophy, 2002). Fourth, research must account for how
designs function in authentic settings. It must not only document
success or failure but also focus on interactions that refine our understanding of the learning issues involved. Fifth, the development
of such accounts relies on methods that can document and connect processes of enactment to outcomes of interest.

Educational Researcher, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 58

Why We Need Design-Based Research:

Challenges of Context, Design, and Enactment
The last few years have seen a renewed effort to close the credibility gap (Levin & ODonnell, 1999) in educational research.
Some see this gap as arising from unscientific research approaches
(e.g., NRC, 2002), while others point to the detachment of research from practice (Lagemann & Shulman, 1999). Educational research that is detached from practice may not account
for the influence of contexts, the emergent and complex nature
of outcomes, and the incompleteness of knowledge about which
factors are relevant for prediction (Robinson, 1998). Claiming
success for an educational intervention is a tricky business. If success means being certain that an intervention caused learning,
then we need to look carefully at the intervention in a particular
setting. However, research in this model would be difficult to
generalize to other settings. On the other hand, if success means
being able to claim that an intervention could be effective in any
setting, then we should study effects across a variety of settings
in order to generalize. However, this kind of research leaves many
questions unanswered about how any observed learning was
caused by interactions between intervention and setting. To address these problems, we view educational interventions holisticallywe see interventions as enacted through the interactions
between materials, teachers, and learners. Because the intervention as enacted is a product of the context in which it is implemented, the intervention is the outcome (or at least an outcome)
in an important sense.
In addition, the design of innovations enables us to create
learning conditions that learning theory suggests are productive,
but that are not commonly practiced or are not well understood.
For example, the Jasper Series (Cognition and Technology Group
at Vanderbilt, 1997) was one of the first learning environments
that presented students with an opportunity to develop computational skills by grappling with real-world scenarios. This innovation allowed the testing of the tenets of anchored instruction,
which included the belief that learning should be contextualized,
and of ideas that mathematics learning should be more closely
tied to students experience. Successive classroom trials with different versions of these series contributed to an understanding of
the characteristics of an effective anchor, clarified issues for the
theoretical refinement of transfer, and showed how social interactions play a role in metacognition.
Illustrations of Design-Based Research
Design-based research methods focus on designing and exploring
the whole range of designed innovations: artifacts as well as less
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concrete aspects such as activity structures, institutions, scaffolds,

and curricula. Importantly, design-based research goes beyond
merely designing and testing particular interventions. Interventions embody specific theoretical claims about teaching and
learning, and reflect a commitment to understanding the relationships among theory, designed artifacts, and practice. At the
same time, research on specific interventions can contribute to
theories of learning and teaching.
One example is the BGuILE project (Reiser et al., 2001), a
program of research to support inquiry learning in biology. The
underlying innovative approach was the use of discipline-specific
scaffolds for data analysis and explanation construction. Initial
design efforts focused on developing software and activity structures to support student investigations of episodes of natural selection, followed by cycles of design, enactment, and analysis to
successively refine the relationships between technological scaffolds for inquiry and social scaffolds to support scientific discourse. Besides improving the curriculum design, this project
yielded concomitant findings concerning psychological aspects
of students understanding of scientific explanation and argumentation (Sandoval, 2003), as
well as the role that artifacts and
the social interactions around
them play in such processes
(Tabak & Reiser, 1997). Such
findings provide insights into
the complexity involved in developing knowledge and skills,
and they help us understand
the role that teachers play in
capitalizing on the affordances
of learning materials, but they
could easily have gone unnoticed had the research focused
solely on the summative effects
of the intervention.
Design-based research methods respond to emergent features
of the setting. For example, the Passion School Project (Joseph,
2002) articulated theoretical principles that should drive an
interest-based curriculum, including the principle that students
develop competencies in adult-defined learning objectives
through engagement in authentic work in their area of interest.
Micro-analyses of student interactions with activities based on
that principle enabled redesign and refinement of activities, and
ultimately refinement of the underlying interest-driven learning
framework. Thus, emergent behaviors of students in response to
activities drove development of the intervention and development of theory. These developments would have been unimaginable in the absence of real student choices.
Finally, in design-based research, practitioners and researchers work together to produce meaningful change in contexts of
practice (e.g., classrooms, after-school programs, teacher on-line
communities). Such collaboration means that goals and design
constraints are drawn from the local context as well as the researchers agenda, addressing one concern of many reform efforts
(Robinson, 1998). Engaging such partnerships across multiple
settings can uncover relationships between the numerous vari-

ables that come into play in classroom contexts and help refine
the key components of an intervention. In particular, these partnerships can help us distinguish between a lethal mutation
(Brown & Campione, 1996)a reinterpretation that no longer
captures the pedagogical essence of the innovationfrom a productive adaptationa reinterpretation that preserves this essence,
but tailors the activity to the needs and characteristics of particular classrooms. For example, Baumgartner (1999) described
how several teachers adopted different strategies to manage the
tension between performance goals (e.g., building effective fishing rods) and explanatory goals (e.g., understanding why the rod
works the way it does) in a science and engineering curriculum.
The role that local interpretation plays in successful implementation became salient by examining the cases in which different
teachers strategies achieved similar instructional goals. Indeed,
such reinterpretation is inevitable and necessary. Sustainable innovation requires understanding how and why an innovation
works within a setting over time and across settings (Brown &
Campione, 1996), and generating heuristics for those interested
in enacting innovations in their own local contexts.

Importantly, design-based

Design-based research has recently been described as a potentially fruitful methodology

for generating causal accounts
of learning and instruction that
could form the basis for systematic, randomized clinical trials
(Levin & ODonnell, 1999;
NRC, 2002). We see designbased research as raising important questions for research
applied to practice and for research methods, generally. However,
randomized trials are not necessarily the appropriate end goal of
our research approach; we do not understand issues of context
well enough yet to guarantee that randomized trials are the best
means to answer the questions we care about. The use of randomized trials may hinder innovation studies by prematurely
judging the efficacy of an intervention. Additionally, randomized trials may systematically fail to account for phenomena that
violate this methods basic assumptionsthat is, phenomena
that are contextually dependent or those that result from the interaction of dozens, if not hundreds, of factors. Indeed, such phenomena are precisely what educational research most needs to
account for in order to have application to educational practice.
We would suggest, however, that design-based research can generate plausible causal accounts because of its focus on linking
processes to outcomes in particular settings, and can productively
be linked with controlled laboratory experiments or randomized
clinical trials (cf. Brown, 1992) by assisting in the identification of
relevant contextual factors, aiding in identification of mechanisms
(not just relationships), and enriching our understanding of the
nature of the intervention itself. For example, the CoMPASS

research goes beyond

merely designing and
testing particular
interventions.

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER

Relationships Between
Design-Based Research
and Other
Methodologies

project on computer-based conceptual representations in science learning illustrates one approach to linking design-based
research and more traditional studies through informing cycles
(Puntambekar, 2002). Though initial work showed learning effects of the conceptual representations, alternation between fieldbased implementation studies and controlled experimental work
helped refine understanding of the important features that affect
students use of these representations.
We do not claim that there is a single design-based research
method, but the overarching, explicit concern in design-based research for using methods that link processes of enactment to outcomes has power to generate knowledge that directly applies to
educational practice. The value of attending to context is not
simply that it produces a better understanding of an intervention, but also that it can lead to improved theoretical accounts of
teaching and learning. In this sense, design-based research differs
from evaluation research in the ways context and interventions
are problematized.
In traditional evaluation, an interventionan instructional
program, a textbook, or a policyis measured against a set of
standards (Worthen, Sanders, & Fitzpatrick, 1996). During formative evaluation, iterative cycles of development, implementation, and study allow the designer to gather information about
how an intervention is or is not succeeding in ways that might
lead to better design. Then the intervention is frozen, and the
rigorous summative evaluation begins. Evaluators often conceptualize context as a set of factors that are independent of the intervention itself but that may influence its effects. Like formative
evaluation, design-based research uses mixed methods to analyze
an interventions outcomes and refine the intervention. Unlike
evaluation research, design-based research views a successful innovation as a joint product of the designed intervention and the
context. Hence, design-based research goes beyond perfecting a
particular product. The intention of design-based research in education is to inquire more broadly into the nature of learning in
a complex system and to refine generative or predictive theories
of learning. Models of successful innovation can be generated
through such workmodels, rather than particular artifacts or
programs, are the goal (cf. Brown & Campione, 1996).
Challenges Faced by Design-Based
Research Methods
The commitment to using theory-driven design to generate complex interventions that can be improved through empirical study
and that can contribute to more basic understanding of the underlying theory raises significant challenges. Objectivity, reliability, and validity are all necessary to make design-based research
a scientifically sound enterprise, but these qualities are managed
in noticeably different ways than in controlled experimentation
(e.g., Barab & Kirshner, 2001). Design-based research relies on
techniques used in other research paradigms, like thick descriptive datasets, systematic analysis of data with carefully defined
measures, and consensus building within the field around interpretations of data.
By trying to promote objectivity while attempting to facilitate
the intervention, design-based researchers regularly find themselves in the dual intellectual roles of advocate and critic. Although
there are no simple solutions to what we see as a necessary tension

arising from the coupling of empirical research to design, it is possible to employ specific research methods to question the designerresearchers tacitly held assumptions. In particular, design-based
research typically triangulates multiple sources and kinds of data
to connect intended and unintended outcomes to processes of
enactment. In our view, methods that document processes of enactment provide critical evidence to establish warrants for claims
about why outcomes occurred.
Complications arise from sustained intervention in messy settings. A single, complex intervention (e.g., a 4-week curriculum
sequence) might involve hundreds, if not thousands, of discrete
designer, researcher, and teacher decisionshopefully working
in concertin an attempt to promote innovative practice. In
these situations, causality can be difficult to decipher and disambiguate; all possible factors cannot logistically be equally pursued; precise replication of an intervention is largely impossible;
and emergent phenomena regularly lead to new lines of inquiry
informed by current theories or models of the phenomena. Reliability of findings and measures can be promoted through triangulation from multiple data sources, repetition of analyses
across cycles of enactment, and use (or creation) of standardized
measures or instruments.
Validity of findings is often addressed by the partnerships and
iteration typical of design-based research, which result in increasing alignment of theory, design, practice, and measurement
over time. For instance, Hoadley (2002) described how a designbased approach to studying mechanisms for learning via on-line
discussions led to a fundamental rethinking of the theoretical notion of social inclusiveness and, with the help of local participants
and teachers, its operationalization in the research program. This
shift avoided a misinterpretation of data and produced an improved learning environment besides.
A logistical challenge for design-based researchers involves
maintaining a productive collaborative partnership with participants in the research context. Because a single line of research
often investigates multiple cycles of design, enactment, and study,
the work can span years and touch on closely held commitments
of the researchers and teachers. Indeed, successful examples of
design-based research often are conducted within a single setting
over a long time (e.g., Linn & Hsi, 2000), and the success of the
innovation and the knowledge gained from its study depend in
part on being able to sustain the partnership between researchers
and teachers. There is a trade-off here between the refinement of
a particular innovation to maximize its success, and the generalization of findings from an ultimately highly refined enactment.
The challenge for design-based research is in flexibly developing
research trajectories that meet our dual goals of refining locally
valuable innovations and developing more globally usable knowledge for the field.
Given the multifaceted nature of the enterprise, a further challenge for design-based research is ensuring that knowledge claims
are used appropriately. We have suggested ways in which designbased research can generate usable knowledge about educational
practice, but even usable knowledge will not make complex educational problems simple. Ongoing methodological development is needed to enhance rigor while respecting the importance
of local context. More importantly, we stress that design-based
research should not become a euphemism for anything goes research or oversimplified interventions.
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Prospects for Design-Based Research in Education

We suggest that the value of design-based research should be
measured by its ability to improve educational practice. We see
four areas where design-based research methods provide the
most promise: (a) exploring possibilities for creating novel learning and teaching environments, (b) developing theories of learning and instruction that are contextually based, (c) advancing
and consolidating design knowledge, and (d) increasing our capacity for educational innovation. We have seen progress in the
area of developing new insights concerning novel pedagogy in
classroom contexts (e.g., Linn & Hsi, 2000). We should make
concerted efforts to accumulate the usable knowledge we produce and to cultivate long-term partnerships and infrastructure
for systemic change.

Exploring Possibilities for Novel Learning and

Teaching Environments
Efforts to design, use, and do research on educational tools and
materials in real settings can promote the adoption of innovations. They can help researchers and designers understand the
real-world demands placed on designs and on adopters of designs.
In addition, pursuing development and enactment through close
collaboration with teachers places them in direct ownership of designs. Although design-based research is positioned to address
these issues, sustaining innovations hinges on our ability to articulate the mechanisms that underlie their success.

Developing Contextualized Theories of

Learning and Teaching
We have argued that design-based research methods are of value
in addressing research questions related to the enactment of interventions in varying contexts. As a field, educational research
must develop better theories of the elements of context that matter for the nature of learning and for the implications of policy for
local educational practices. Design-based research can contribute
to such theories through rich accounts of instructional interventions and their effects across multiple settings and in multiple
areas of instruction.

Constructing Cumulative Design Knowledge

Design-based research can lead to an understanding of relevant
design knowledge and practices as they apply to naturalistic settings. In design-oriented fields, design knowledge is often characterized by common examples, patterns, and principles, and by
the expertise required to apply these generalities in specific settings. Currently, design-based research communicates this knowledge in many forms, including narratives of planned and enacted
instruction (Hoadley, 2002; Linn & Hsi, 2000), design principles connecting enacted designs to educational outcomes of interest (Bell, 2002b), and design patterns abstracted from one or
more settings describing how a designed innovation interacts
with settings and evolves (Orrill, 2001). We hope for a scholarship of design in education that adopts common communicative
approaches and links theory to local applied understandings,
similar to research in architecture or engineering.

Increasing Human Capacity for Innovation

Design-based research provides numerous opportunities for the
exchange of expertise across disciplinary boundaries. Interactions
between partners reveal crucial practices that lead to insights
8

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER

about what occurs when we orchestrate complex interventions in

messy settings (Cobb, 2001). As a natural entailment of design
research partnerships, the participants frequently learn about the
phenomena under study, encounter new theoretical lenses, and
acquire experience in conducting and interpreting new analytical techniques (Barab & Kirshner, 2001; Edelson, 2002). The
need for innovation in education is ongoing, as theories of learning and teaching lead to usable knowledge about and reform of
instructional practice. Therefore, the development of people who
can apply this knowledge (teachers, administrators, policymakers,
and researchers) and who understand and can orchestrate educational change in context should more explicitly drive design-based
research partnerships.
Summary
We have argued that design-based research methods can compose
a coherent methodology that bridges theoretical research and educational practice. Viewing both the design of an intervention
and its specific enactments as objects of research can produce robust explanations of innovative practice and provide principles
that can be localized for others to apply to new settings. Designbased research, by grounding itself in the needs, constraints, and
interactions of local practice, can provide a lens for understanding how theoretical claims about teaching and learning can be
transformed into effective learning in educational settings.
NOTE

We thank Larry Bucciarelli, Allan Collins, Valerie Crawford, Andy

diSessa, Kris Gutierrez, Eric Hamilton, Yasmin Kafai, Anthony E.
Kelly, Carol Lee, Barbara Means, Roy Pea, Brian Reiser, Nora Sabelli,
Leona Schauble, Rich Shavelson, Finbarr Sloane, Philip Vahey, and
Louise Yarnall, as well as our anonymous reviewers, for valuable feedback. Klaus Krause, David Perkins, Alexis Whaley, and Jim Kloss provided invaluable editorial help. We especially thank the Spencer
Foundation and the funders of our individual research projects for financial support, although the views expressed here are our own.
AUTHORS

THE DESIGN-BASED RESEARCH COLLECTIVE includes, in alphabetical order, Eric Baumgartner (University of California at Berkeley and
Inquirium, LLC); Philip Bell (University of Washington); Sean Brophy
(Vanderbilt University); Christopher Hoadley (Pennsylvania State University); Sherry Hsi (The Exploratorium); Diana Joseph (University of
Chicago); Chandra Orrill (University of Georgia); Sadhana Puntambekar
(University of Connecticut); William Sandoval (University of California,
Los Angeles); and Iris Tabak (Ben Gurion University of the Negev). All
contributed to the writing of this article. The Design-Based Research Collective is a group of faculty and researchers founded to examine, improve,
and practice design-based research methods in education. The groups
members all blend research on learning and the design of educational interventions. The Collective is funded by an Advanced Studies Institute
grant from the Spencer Foundation to Christopher Hoadley at Pennsylvania State University. More about the group, its aims, and its members
may be viewed on-line at http://www.designbasedresearch.org/
Address correspondence to Christopher Hoadley, College of Education and School of Information Sciences & Technology, Pennsylvania
State University, 314D Keller Building, University Park, PA 16802;
[email protected].
Manuscript received March 25, 2002
Revisions received November 6, 2002
Accepted November 7, 2002