TERC and the International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE) support a virtual workshop to examine the rigorous scholarship behind educational design and explore its potential for the transformation of STEM teaching and learning environments. The virtual workshop engages a core group of ISDDE principals in the articulation and examination of design processes. Key questions are: What do we know about the elements of effective design as well as the process of designing? What features of designs and the process of designing transform STEM learning? The planning group develops a collection of papers that present fundamental tenets surrounding design issues in the domains of instructional materials and professional development for STEM learning and teaching. A virtual panel of respondents and critical thinkers respond to these papers and help develop an agenda for further discussion and research conceptualization.
Four to five papers are commissioned that address fundamental tenets about what to design and how to design for enhanced student learning in the domains of STEM instructional materials and professional development. The papers are to address various characteristics of enhanced student learning such as Universal, Backward and Strategic Design, embedded formative assessments, electronic communities, personalized learning, cyberlearning, culturally responsive teaching and learning. Up to 10 "correspondents" prepare written comments about the commissioned papers. Their comments are circulated among project participants and one or more virtual discussion panels are convened to assemble and analyze the comments. A final report that informs subsequent research and development in the use of design in STEM learning is compiled and disseminated.
Instructional materials are presently being developed without a theory of good design underlying the activity. The virtual workshop develops an active community of people who have long experience in developing instructional materials and professional development and people with expertise in design to engage in substantive dialogue to produce an up-to-date body of knowledge to inform a research agenda for designs and design processes to transform STEM teaching and learning.
Envisioning the future The goal of this planning grant was to envision particular new lines of research and design work that would support transformative educational outcomes. We identified a number of existing support structures, but also identified critical gaps through case study analyses, and propose a particular new approach. Specifically, our case analyses suggested there were important gaps between the pre-award support (such as via Idea Labs) and late-award knowledge distribution within program support Centers (such as CADRE, CIRCL, STELLAR). Grants aimed at transformative outcomes will have all the characteristics of projects that will be especially likely to struggle: they are considering new media or new uses of existing media, they are involving interdisciplinary teams, and they are creating new learning genres. Early on in the post-award process, such grants would benefit from supports in this challenging phase. But existing support mechanisms do not support them well. Instead, we recommend collaborative working across projects with shared challenges (but not necessarily within a particular grant program). The collaborations would build on emergent themes from the field, such as: What qualifies as evidence of learning in games? What is the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive impacts of games? How do we measure skills and knowledge in a ways that aligned with NGSS (i.e., the integration of concepts with practices) inside games? Given the importance of free choice in games, how can we keep students growing cognitively rather than leaving them in long cycles of conceptual rehash? How do we build games that productively connect to outside science learning into and out from the gaming environment? How can cultural resources be productively framed to influence design? In other words, the collaboration would not center on the whole challenge of any particular grant, but rather on critical aspect shared by many grants. The collaborative work would involve some kind of medium term outcome worth having (e.g., book chapters or other recognizable/valued object). The size of the object must be small enough to not substantially compete with the educational design work (e.g., journal articles often involve longer, more in-depth cycles of analysis) but nonetheless be something considered worth having and require some level of commitment/investment. The collaborative work could be divided into critical but relatively short phases, such as: - brainstorming possible problem definitions - refining/selecting resonating problem definitions - proposing possible solutions These phases could be done through a mixture of face-to-face at meetings within existing conferences, video conferencing, and online tools. Particularly relevant to this kind of detailed ideation work, there could be simple online tools that support innovation competitions with community feedback but adapted to educational design (e.g., openIDEO https://openideo.com). "Winning" ideas could get some extra recognition/prize for the original idea proposers, both providing social incentive for participation but also providing a method for promoting particularly useful or innovative ideas. Finally, the face-to-face or videoconference aspects could be done with a smaller subset of people, and the larger group could be divided into differential roles, reflecting differential time/commitment. For example, there could be architects (who participate most regularly and develop detailed proposals for comment), thinkers (who generate critical feedback on detailed proposals), and reflectors (who react to emerging directions, perhaps from more outsider perspectives).
