Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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the outcomes actually meant, and about what evidence was required to be
gathered;
2. „learning buddy‟ – students in the first class chose a „learning buddy‟ with whom
they developed a learning contract that set out their learning objectives for the
semester. Every week, 30 minutes at the beginning of class time was set aside for
learning buddies to get together to focus on their intent for that day‟s class, and to
reflect on their learning over the past week;
3. reflective journal – students were required to keep a weekly reflective journal: an
assessable element was that they were required to write a critique of their
reflections at weeks 6 & 12.
4. peer discussions in class;
5. co-created assessment criteria.
The fourth decision point, concerning the evaluation of the interventions, lead to the
questions “What do I evaluate?” and “How?” In traditional educational research,
“interventions” (such as instructional programs, texts or teaching policies) are measured
against established standards (Worthen et al, 1997). However, DBR takes this further and
regards successful interventions as the joint product of both the designed intervention and
the context. Its ambition is to inquire more broadly into the nature of complex educational
systems.
This in turn led to the final decision point of the iterative cycle, namely “How does my
experience inform my understanding (of Co-Creating Learning Intent) and continue to
build the theory (about both Co-Creating Learning Intent and the design-based research
process)?”
Conclusions and future research plans
Design-based research has been found to be an extremely useful methodology to employ
in the context of this case study, namely piloting a strategic framework for assessment
developed by a research team. Although superficially similar to „action research‟ (McNiff
and Whitehead, 2006), DBR is grounded in theory and has an explicit ambition to build on
and develop theory. In the author‟s experience as presented here, DBR has enabled
manageable parts of a very complex system to be investigated, providing both theoretical
insights and practicable interventions. Indeed it would appear that DBR may prove to be a
key approach in the process of embedding / embodying complex frameworks that emerge
from big projects, which are often so extremely generalised and abstract that they struggle
to get implemented effectively.
Although the work described here is related to the application of DBR to a specific
exploration of co-creating learning intent, the author concludes that the DBR process
illustrated in Figure 1 could be applied effectively not only to other aspects of self-directed
and team-based learning, but indeed to large areas of curriculum design. In this case, the
research-team phase becomes the curriculum development phase, and there is greater
emphasis in the next phase on the role of teacher. It is likely that the process can be
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011