• What is Design-based Research (DBR)?
• How does DBR differ from other approaches?
• How did DBR get started?
• What are the benefits of DBR?
• What are some critical perspective?

What are some critical perspective?

Some of the critical perspectives include

• Absence of the standards for identifying when a design should be abandoned or to be promising enough to warrant future exploration (Dede, 2004)

Finding time for research in classroom settings is always challenging, and design-based research tends to be time consuming because of its iterative nature. Time in schools is quite limited and the short school day is full of other demands. Thus the use of time for research purposes must be utilized in a great care, and the standards for identifying promising instructional interventions or interventions unworkable should be clearly in place.

• Being under-conceptualized

diSessa and Cobb (2004) argue many design based studies lack a strong theoretical foundation and does not attempt to generate findings important for the refinement and evolution of theory. According to Dede (2004), part of this shortfall may be that the skills of creative designers and the attributes of rigorous scholars have limited overlap. Effective designed-based research groups usually try to strike a balance between “whatever works” for innovation and controlled, principled variations. People fascinated by artifacts also are often tempted to start with a predetermined “solution” and seek educational problems to which it can be applied, a strategy that frequently leads to under-conceptualized research.

• Being over-methodologized and suffering from the problems in respect to excess data and data analysis

Brown (1992) expressed concern over data selection as a possible limitation of design research. Due to the very iterative nature of DBR, it is likely that things around the research questions were repeatedly interviewed, videotaped, surveyed, and so forth. And the excess data usually result in huge efforts for analyzing, and the outcomes might only have tiny contributions to educational knowledge. Certainly, there are DBR studies result in valuable findings using elegant design and data collection and analysis strategies. Still, the trap of too little contribution and too much method is one into which DBR can easily fall.

• Difficult to make generalizations across participants

The very nature of design research in which adjustments can continually be made in the implementation of an instructional intervention make it very difficult to know what combination of feature of the intervention actually contribute to its success. Generalizations are difficult to make because of complexity involved in implementation and the confounds in identifying contributors to success (O’Donnell, 2004).

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