Design Research: Learn from Literature
Authors: AnnaB, with GyuEun Park, Miaojun Xu and Yu Zhao
How does literature review fit into our design process?
Literature review mainly fits into the research and ideation phase.
Guiding Literature
Over the course of the semester, we consulted various articles and design precedents to inform our design journey. Below, we’ve collected four of the most relevant for our project, with the purposes listed underneath.
- Chi, M. T., De Leeuw, N., Chiu, M. H., & LaVancher, C. (1994). Eliciting self-explanations improves understanding. Cognitive science, 18(3), 439–477.
This article shows that when eight-grade students are prompted to self-explain their understanding of a reading, they demonstrate greater learning gains from pre to post test.
This guided our understanding of how reflection prompts function in the classroom and how knowledge should be integrated. It also helped us understand the best way to solicit explanations from middle school students.
- White, B. Y., & Frederiksen, J. R. (1998). Inquiry, modeling, and metacognition: Making science accessible to all students. Cognition and instruction, 16(1), 3–118.
This article discusses the ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum, which is centered around a metacognitive model of research and a metacognitive process. The metacognitive process, called Reflective Assessment, resulted in increased learning gains and was particularly beneficial for low-achieving students.
This enhanced our understanding of why reflection works and how it should be measured, and overall gave us a greater understanding of the problem space.
- Clark, H. C. (1996). Design of performance based assessments as contributors to student knowledge integration. University of California, Berkeley.
This article discusses how assessments can be designed to aid in students’ integration of knowledge.
It helped us during the revision and iteration part of our process, when we narrowed and polished our platform.
- Schwartz, D. L., Tsang, J. M., & Blair, K. P. (2016). The ABCs of how we learn: 26 scientifically proven approaches, how they work, and when to use them. WW Norton & Company.
This book describes 26 unique ways that students learn. Each chapter provides a concise breakdown of one way people learn, how it works, how we know it works, how and when to use it, and what mistakes to avoid it.
This book was helpful during the ideation phase, as we explored different paths and tried to find the one that would best fit the context.
Other Precedents
Other articles and design precedents that informed out projects are listed below.
- Martin, L. (2015). The promise of the Maker Movement for education. Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER), 5(1), 4.
- Halverson E. & Sheridan K. (2014) The Maker Movement in Education. Harvard Educational Review 84:4, 495–504
- Chapters 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 in A Practical Guide to Open Portfolios (2018) by Stephanie Chang, Lisa Regalla, Goli Mohammadi. In The Maker Ed Open Portfolio Project: A Networked Vision for Sharing and Documenting. Maker Education Initiative.
- Barron, B.,& Darling-Hammond, L. (2008). Teaching for Meaningful Learning: A Review of Research on Inquiry-Based and Cooperative Learning. Book Excerpt. George Lucas Educational Foundation
- Cooper, A., Reimann, R., Cronin, D., Noessel, C. (2014). Understanding Users — Qualitative Research Ch. 2 & 3
- About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th Edition. Wiley.
- Wixon, D. R., Ramey, J., Holtzblatt, K., Beyer, H., Hackos, J., Rosenbaum, S & Laakso, K. P. (2002, April). Usability in practice: field methods evolution and revolution. In CHI’02 Extended Abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 880–884). ACM.
- Zeisel, J. (2006). Focused Interviews — Chap 10 in Inquiry by design: Environment/behavior/neuroscience in architecture, interiors, landscape, and planning. WW Norton & Co.
- Collins, A. & Kapur, M. (2014). Cognitive Apprenticeship, Chap 6. In Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.).The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. Cambridge University Press.
