Design Experiments

Collin’s article: The long-term goal of design experiment is “to construct a design theory for technology innovation.” It is not hard to picture how the future education will be. Technology leads education. As the speech in CID exhibition last week, the future research needs to connect with the technology with effective pedagogy. Software is updating and renewing so rapidly to meet the education’s need. Maybe in the future, people do not need to go to the school for their complete education and obtain better knowledge than the classroom instruction.

I like Brown’s article about design experiments, whose goal is to increase lasting retention. However, when conducting design experiment, those effects: Bartlett effect (sample selection), Hawthorne effect (better performance in experiment), and Dewey effect (readiness and pedagogical creed) can occur to influence results. I think there is another effect affecting experiments: personal constructs. Before conducting experiment, we have set up our hypothesis (our construct) to invisibly influence our experiments.

It seems Brown appreciates reciprocal teaching, community learning and personal constructs. Reciprocal Teaching is different from traditional teaching. Learners are no longer passive receivers but are assigned to some specific task which includes question formation and answer searching. Instructors provide background information and remind students when they are astray from the topic or the solutions are not appropriate. Through practical question-answer quest, learners realize the model and know how to solve problems. Reciprocal teaching is not only benefits reading and writing classes, but other fields of learning subjects.

In short, the design experiment is the process to discover better pedagogical ways (for example, communities of learner) with the help of technology. It searches the methods to improve retention and metacognition in real-world situation, which is the lifelong learning.