Launching Implementing Design-Based Research in Education

On November 4th we launched Implementing Design-Based Research in Education: Practical Tools and Strategies at the Trinity Long Room Hub. It was a lovely evening with colleagues, friends and family, and a real pleasure to celebrate the book with my co-authors Ann Devitt and Jen O’Sullivan.

Design-based research usually starts with a problem someone cares about. An educator notices that something in their classroom isn’t working and wants to try a different way. As researchers, we work alongside them to design something, test it, change it and test it again.

One reason we wrote the book is that we remember how unsure we felt doing this for the first time. The process rarely goes to plan, and the tidy diagrams in methods books don’t always reflect on what to do when things shift in the middle of a study.

This book is for doctoral students, educators who are curious about research and researchers who are new to this approach. We’ve tried to include the tools and strategies we wish we’d had, along with some honesty about the parts that are hard.

We hope it helps others get started and keep going, even when their project takes an unexpected turn. In our experience, those turns are often where the most interesting work happens.