Design-Based Implementation Research: An Emerging Model for Transforming the Relationship of Research and PracticeFishman, Barry J.; Penuel, William R.; Allen, Anna-Ruth; Cheng, Britte Haugan; Sabelli, Nora
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501415pmid: N/A
This chapter presents an introduction to design-based implementation research (DBIR). We describe the need for DBIR as a research approach that challenges educational researchers and practitioners to transcend traditional research/practice barriers to facilitate the design of educational interventions that are effective, sustainable, and scalable. We examine antecedents to DBIR, including evaluation research, community-based participatory research, design-based research, and implementation research. The four core principles of DBIR are explained: (1) a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; (2) a commitment to iterative, collaborative design; (3) a concern with developing theory and knowledge related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and (4) a concern with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems. We close with an overview of the chapters contained in this NSSE Yearbook on DBIR and explain how each chapter contributes to the overall development of the DBIR approach.
Adaptation by Design: A Context-Sensitive, Dialogic Approach to InterventionsKirshner, Ben; Polman, Joseph L.
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501403pmid: N/A
Applied researchers, whether working with the framework of design-based research or intervention science, face a similar implementation challenge: practitioners who enact their programs typically do so in varied, context-specific ways. Although this variability is often seen as a problem for those who privilege fidelity and standardization, we argue for the advantages of researcher-practitioner collaborations that encourage local adaptation and ingenuity. We develop this argument for adaptive interventions by discussing two design-based research projects, Critical Civic Inquiry (CCI) and Science Literacy through Science Journalism (SciJourn), which create opportunities for youth to develop civics and science literacy respectively. CCI and SciJourn aim to build curricula that will travel to new schools and districts, but not through standardization. This is a delicate combination: the program must be flexible enough to enable productive adaptation, without being so protean that practitioners’ implementations lack substantive commonalities. We present two cases that show how project designers have sought to distinguish between invariant principles that define the intervention and heterogeneous practices that vary across sites. The cases also show how the model has improved when teachers can adapt it to their institutional context and when teachers and researchers establish social norms that encourage dialogic interactions.
Negotiating Problems of Practice in Research–Practice Design PartnershipsPenuel, William R.; Coburn, Cynthia E.; Gallagher, Daniel J.
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501404pmid: N/A
This chapter focuses on how researchers and practitioners negotiate the focus of their joint work within design-based implementation research (DBIR). Studying and facilitating successful negotiation of the problems that become the focus of work and the search for solutions is important for developing DBIR, because of its commitment to focusing on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives. Case studies of two different research–practice partnerships provide a context for exploring two different perspectives on negotiation. In one case study, the notion of partnerships as forms of cultural exchange across institutional boundaries that differ with respect to goals, norms, and practices is used to analyze a design partnership focused on repurposing curriculum units in elementary science. In the second case study, the concept of framing as developed in social movement theory is used to illuminate issues of status and authority within a partnership between a district and researchers. The chapter concludes by describing the contributions of each perspective to an understanding of how teams jointly negotiate the focus of their work and by providing some recommendations for how teams can do so successfully.
Beyond the Policy Memo: Designing to Strengthen the Practice of District Central Office Leadership for Instructional Improvement at ScaleHonig, Meredith I.
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501405pmid: N/A
This chapter argues for the importance of design-based leadership research (DBLR) for advancing the research and practice of educational leadership, with a focus on school district central offices. DBLR, like other design-based research, calls on researchers to develop designs for practice. Unlike other such research in education that calls for designs for classrooms, DBLR focuses on designs for leaders. Researchers working in this mode develop designs for leadership practice that reflect the latest knowledge about how leaders matter for improved student results; they work alongside leaders to use that knowledge to design and engage in new forms of their own practice consistent with the knowledge and appropriate to their settings. Participants study the process to feed new knowledge into the partnership sites and the field. This chapter elaborates how such research differs from traditional scholarship on district central offices and forms of action research. Challenges to conducting DBLR include focusing practitioners on central offices (especially in tough budget times), capturing central office practice in DBLR knowledge-building activities, and growing and sustaining the work. Early experience illuminates how to address those challenges and advance DBLR partnerships that promise to significantly strengthen leadership practice in support of improved results for all students.In school districts across the country, central office staff members are working to improve how they lead district-wide instructional improvement, but are finding few guides or supports for that work, what design researchers might call limited “designs” for their leadership. Consider the following example.In a Midwestern school district, the superintendent promoted a successful principal, Betty Greene, to a new high-level position, reporting directly to the superintendent's office. In that position, she and two colleagues are to help all district principals become better instructional leaders—principals who do not mainly manage their buildings, but work intensively with teachers to improve the quality of classroom instruction. Greene's new position represents a sea change for many school district central offices from their historical focus on business and regulatory functions to providing direct, intensive supports to schools to improve the quality of instruction across the district. Greene enthusiastically accepted the position. She believed she had expert knowledge of high-quality teaching and how principals could support it. She viewed the new post as an opportunity to take some of her own successful school-level leadership to scale across the district. However, once in her new post, she struggled. With no predecessor to consult with, she wondered, “I know my charge is to help principals become stronger instructional leaders, but what does that mean I actually do day-to-day to realize those results?” As a school principal, she had access to myriad professional development opportunities, such as workshops sponsored by the state, the district, and outside groups, as well as conferences and peer networking opportunities. While not all of those opportunities were high quality, Greene always took something away from them. But in the central office, she found professional development opportunities for staff virtually nonexistent. Three years into the post, she reflected, “I have been in a building for 30 years and building principal for 20. When I was principal, I regularly complained that central office staff were never in my building. I have been at this job for three years, but I am hardly ever in buildings myself. I don't know what to do when I'm there to help.”
Supporting Teachers in Schools to Improve Their Instructional PracticeBorko, Hilda; Klingner, Janette
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501406pmid: N/A
To meet the growing demand for teacher learning opportunities, the educational community must create scalable professional development models and study their effectiveness. In this chapter, we argue that design-based implementation research (DBIR) is ideally suited to these efforts, and we use two research projects in which we are currently involved as illustrative cases: CSR Colorado and Implementing the Problem-Solving Cycle (iPSC). The core of CSR Colorado is Collaborative Strategic Reading, an instructional approach designed to enhance reading comprehension in content classes. The focus of iPSC is the Problem-Solving Cycle, a mathematics professional development (PD) program designed to help teachers improve their instruction through closely examining mathematics problems, student thinking, and pedagogical practices. Each project works with a school district to bring a PD model to scale, and both projects are studying the structures and resources needed to build the district's capacity to sustain the model beyond the duration of the research. The chapter describes each project and discusses the successes and challenges we experienced as we collaborated with the districts and schools to carry them out. By highlighting two very different projects we show how, through different means, it is possible to achieve the same ultimate end of a scaled-up program for improving instructional practices.
Designing for Productive Adaptations of Curriculum InterventionsDebarger, Angela Haydel; Choppin, Jeffrey; Beauvineau, Yves; Moorthy, Savitha
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501407pmid: N/A
Productive adaptations at the classroom level are evidence-based curriculum adaptations that are responsive to the demands of a particular classroom context and still consistent with the core design principles and intentions of a curriculum intervention. The model of design-based implementation research (DBIR) offers insights into complexities and challenges of enacting productive curriculum adaptations. We draw from empirical research in mathematics and science classrooms to illustrate criteria for productive adaptations. From these examples, we identify resources needed to encourage and sustain practices to promote productive adaptations in classrooms.
Design Research with Educational Systems: Investigating and Supporting Improvements in the Quality of Mathematics Teaching and Learning at ScaleCobb, Paul; Jackson, Kara; Smith, Thomas; Sorum, Michael; Henrick, Erin
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501408pmid: N/A
This chapter describes a partnership with four urban districts that aimed to develop an empirically grounded theory of action for improving the quality of mathematics instruction at scale. Each year, we conducted a data collection, analysis, and feedback cycle in each district that involved documenting the district's improvement strategies, collecting and analyzing data to assess how these strategies were being implemented, reporting the findings to the district, and making recommendations about how the strategies might be revised. We distinguish between two distinct levels of analysis: providing the districts with timely evidence of how their strategies were playing out in schools, and testing and elaborating the conjectures that comprise our theory of action for instructional improvement. We clarify the crucial role that two research tools played at each level of analysis: our emerging theory of action and an interpretive framework that we used to assess the potential of each district's strategies to contribute to instructional improvement. We also illustrate that our collaboration with the four districts instantiates the basic tenets of design-based implementation research and involved conducting systematic inquiry to develop theory related to improving the quality of classroom instruction and student learning at the system level.
Towards an Evidence Framework for Design-Based Implementation ResearchMeans, Barbara; Harris, Christopher J.
doi: 10.1177/016146811311501409pmid: N/A
Educational interventions typically are complex combinations of human actions, organizational supports, and instructional resources that play out differently in different contexts and with different kinds of students. The complexity and variability of outcomes undermines the notion that interventions either “work” or “don't work.” Under the design-based implementation research (DBIR) model, the implementation of an intervention in particular settings is itself an object of research and a critical part of understanding how to scale an intervention without diluting its effectiveness. In this chapter, we compare the approach to evidence implicit in the defining features of DBIR to the prevailing evidence standards for educational research promoted by national policy. Our aim is to provide a frame for knowledge building within DBIR that draws from the strengths of both design-based research methods and research designs that permit causal inference about program impacts. Moreover, we endeavor to show how DBIR challenges current thinking about what counts as credible research. We conclude by considering the ways in which DBIR is a departure from much educational research in terms of what it means to conduct research that is useful and usable in education settings.