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Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) at AERA 2013

Research and Development at the Intersection of Learning, Implementation and Design

Design-Based Implementation Research

Key Principles

Teams form around a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives.

• Teams are comprised broadly and can include teachers, school and district leaders, researchers, students, and community members.
• Identifying problems requires ongoing negotiation, with careful attention to issues of authority and power in who defines problems and possible solutions.
• Problem identification can benefit from carefully orchestrated processes to identify root causes, key change drivers, and practical theories of action.
  

To improve practice, teams commit to iterative, collaborative design.

• The aim of design is to improve teaching and learning practice, at scale.
• The objects of design are not only curricula and programs they also include the professional development and other supports needed to implement curricula and programs with integrity.
• Design process should allow teams to “get things basically right fast” and/or “fail early and fail often.”
• Design process should be participatory, involving as many stakeholder groups as is feasible.
  

As a strategy for promoting quality in the research and development process, teams develop theory related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry.

• DBIR gives a central role to research and evidence to inform (but not determine) changes to design.
• Theory both guides and emerges from design and the implementation of programs and curricula.
• For any given problem of practice, multiple theories are likely to be needed.
  

Design-based implementation research is concerned with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems.

• One strategy for promoting sustainability of designs is to develop capacity through intentional efforts to develop organizational routines and processes that help innovations travel through a system.
• Capacity is a quality of the institutional ecology of schooling, which includes educational systems, researchers, commercial publishers, and publics.