Review Part II : Jan Van Den Akker, Principle and Methods of Development Research

summarized by: Evangelista L.W. Palupi

This is a review of a chapter of a Akker’s book about design research. In this chapter “Principle and Methods of Development Research” Akker discusses the role of research in relation to educational design and development activities.

In the first part of Capter 1#, Akker focuses on describing the rationale and basic principle of development research by outlining motive for conducting development research, defenition and aim of developmental research and its key characteristic. Furthermore, methods of development research, its problem, and its major challenges will be described in the second part of this chapter which will be described in this section.

5.   Methods of Development Research

Methods of development research are not necessarily different from those in other research approaches. However, there are some specific features that are worth discussing here to further clarify the image of development research. The first one has to do with the central role of formative evaluation procedures in formative research. The second aspect refers to several typical methodological problems and dilemmas for development researchers.

5.1 Formative evaluation as key activity

formative evaluation holds a prominent place in development research, especially in formative research. The main reason for this central role is that formative evaluation provides the information that feeds the cyclic learning process of developers during the subsequent loops of a design and development trajectory. It is most useful when fully integrated in a cycle of analysis, design, evaluation, revision, et cetera, and when contributing to improvement of the intervention. However, a few typical characteristics of formative evaluation within the context of development research approaches deserve some elaboration.

Formative evaluation within development research should not only concentrate on locating shortcomings of the intervention in its current (draft) version, but especially generate suggestions in how to improve those weak points. Richness of information, notably salience and meaningfulness of suggestions in how to make an intervention stronger, is therefore more productive than standardization of methods to collect and analyze data. Also, efficiency of procedures is crucial. The lower the costs in time and energy for data collection, processing, analysis and communication, the bigger the chances on actual use and impact on the development process.

The basic contribution of formative evaluation is to quality improvement of the intervention under development. During development processes, the emphasis in criteria for quality usually shifts from validity, to practicality, to effectiveness (cf. Nieveen’s chapter 10 in this book). Validity refers to the extent that the design of the intervention is based on state-of-the-art knowledge (‘content validity’) and that the various components of the intervention are consistently linked to each other (‘construct validity’). Practicality refers to the extent that users (and other experts) consider the intervention as appealing and usable in ‘normal’ conditions. Effectiveness refers to the extent that the experiences and outcomes with the intervention are consistent with the intended aims.

5.2 Problems and Dilemmas in development research

In this section, Van Den Akker briefly describing some typical problems and dilemmas faced by researchers when doing development research. Some of that problems are:

  • Tension in role division between development and research. A tension can easily arise between designer who are eager to pursue their ideals in creating innovative interventions and researchers who tend to critically seek for correctness of decisions and empirical proof of outcomes.
  • Isolating ‘critical’ variables versus comprehensive and complex design. A typical difference between formative research and many other sorts of research is that one can hardly isolate, manipulate and measure separate variables in the same study. On the contrary, it is the very nature of formative research to investigate comprehensive interventions that deal with many interrelated elements at the same time which makes it very hard to apply.
  • Generalization of findings. Since data collection in formative research is usually limited to small (and purposive) samples, efforts to generalize findings cannot be based on statistical techniques, focusing on generalizations from sample to population. Instead one has to invest in ‘analytical’ forms of generalization: readers need to be supported to make their own attempts to explore the potential transfer of the research findings to theoretical propositions in relation to their own context.

6.   Major Challenges for Development Research

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Review Part I: Jan Van Den Akker, Principle and Methods of Development Research

Reviewed by: Evangelista L.W. Palupi

This is a review of a chapter of a Akker’s book about design research. In this chapter “Principle and Methods of Development Research” Akker discusses the role of research in relation to educational design and development activities.

In the first part of Chapter 1#, Akker focuses on describing the rationale and basic principle of development research by outlining motive for conducting development research, definition and aim of developmental research and its key characteristic. Furthermore, methods of development research, its problem, and its major challenges will be described in the second part of this chapter. In this section I will try to review the first part only.

1. Motives for Development Research

Akker stated that there are various motives for initiating and conducting development research. The basic motive come from the experience that ‘traditional’ research approaches like experiment, surveys, correlation analyses and so on which focus on descriptive knowledge, cannot provide prescriptions with useful solution for variety of design and development problems in education. Another motives stem from the highly ambitious and complex nature of many policies in education worldwide; rather dubious reputation of educational research in general; and a distinct scientific interest at stake.

2. Definition and Aim

There are a lot of labels of development research such as design studies, design experiment design research, developmental/development research, Formative research, formative inquiry, formative experiment, formative evaluation, action research, and engineering research. Thus various labels are rather confusing.

‘Development research’ was ever used by Walker in discussing methodological issues in curriculum research (Walker & Bresler, 1993). Its goal is to inform the decision making process during the development of a product/program in order to improve the product/program being developed and the developers’ capabilities to create things of this kind in future situations. While Akker and Plomp (1993) defined ‘development research’ by its twofold purpose: (i) supporting the development of prototypical products (including providing empirical evidence for their effectiveness), and (ii) generating methodological directions for the design and evaluation of such products. In this approach, the scientific contribution (knowledge growth) is seen as equally important as the practical contribution (product improvement).

Besides having a prominent role/place in curriculum research, development research also has a prominent place in area of educational media and technology. Richey and Nelson (1996) mention as its aim: “improving the processes of instructional design, development, and evaluation … based on either situation-specific problem solving or generalized inquiry procedures” (o.c., p. 1213).

In the board of learning and instruction invest more in’design experiment’, Greeno, Collin and Resnick (1996) highlight the “kind of research that includes developmental work in designing learning environments, formulating curricula, and assessing achievements of cognition and learning and, simultaneously, on efforts to contribute to fundamental scientific understanding” (o.c., p. 41).

In the teacher education area the concept of ‘action research’ is rather popular. It refers to practical inquiries where teachers (often in collaboration with others) investigate and reflect on their own teaching and students’ learning. The primary goal is usually to contribute to the teachers’ professional learning and/or bringing about change in a specific educational setting (Elliott, 1991; Hollingsworth, 1997).

In the area of didactics the emphasis tends to be on ‘developmental research’ as an interactive, cyclic process of development and research in which theoretical ideas of the designer feed the development of products that are tested in classroom settings, eventually leading to theoretically and empirically founded products, learning processes of the developers, and (local) instructional theories.

3. Key Characteristics of Development Research

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