Communicating Design-based Research

The goal of this paper is to improve how we compose and interpret educational design arguments from design-based research (DBR). Despite DBR’s increase in popularity, ongoing discussions about its rigor, and detailed articulations of how to go about doing DBR, there is still a lack of specification when it comes to communicating DBR. We first explore some of the difficulties in communicating DBR and then describe a framework that helps provide guidance for creating and interpreting educational design arguments. Next, we demonstrate one application for this framework through a comparative analysis of several DBR papers and discuss how this framework allows both producers and consumers of design research to make sense of the products of educational design research, in particular educational design arguments. This framework helps the educational and learning sciences communities to mitigate challenges of communicating DBR by creating a more cohesive literature, helping researchers plan and make decisions in the act of conducting and communicating their research, supporting training for less experienced researchers, and establishing a common standard lexicon for DBR communication.