Design Methods¶

The practices a design process is made of — analysis, elicitation, mapping and evaluation work done on the design, not in the classroom.

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In Review¶

Access-Use-Effectiveness Framework - A three-stage framework for evaluating school or district technology integration — having devices (access) does not imply using them for instruction (use), and using them does not imply doing so in pedagogically sound, student-centered ways (effectiveness).
Activity-System Personas and Scenarios - Building learner personas and design scenarios around the activity system a learner acts within — object, mediating tools, rules, community and division of labour — so that the design responds to what constrains the learner rather than to who they are demographically.
Assess early development with sequential ordinal scales that disentangle development from age - Hunt recommends sequential ordinal scales, inspired by Piaget's observations, as an alternative to norm-referenced mental-age and IQ metrics.
Backward Design - A curriculum planning strategy that begins by defining desired learning outcomes and acceptable evidence of achievement, then designs instruction last.
Cognitive Task Analysis - A family of interview and observation methods for eliciting the cues, judgements and decision rules an expert uses but cannot readily articulate — the tacit content that a procedural task analysis records as a single step.
Compare courses for transfer by analyzing implicit outcomes in summative assessments rather than calendar descriptions - Because explicit learning outcomes are often sector-specific, non-standardized, and not aligned with course content or assessments, the article recommends comparing programs through analysis of significant summative a...
Comparing learning intervention effects - Check the learner, contrast, intended outcome, instrument and timing before interpreting or comparing a reported effect size.
Delete items only when test reliability improves upon deletion - The article proposes a data-driven item-deletion procedure: identify candidate items via the k0 intersection acceptance region (k0 ± 2SD of item scores, difficulty or discriminating values), skewness of the parameter...
Description questions are answered by addressing a topic-dependent subset of Wh- and How subquestions - Description questions ask students to describe a person, place, or thing by giving its characteristics or properties, including definitions of concepts.
Designing a Valid Experiment - A scientific experiment isolates one manipulated variable between an experimental and control group, guards against experimenter and participant-expectancy bias through blinding, and uses random sampling for generalizability and random assignment for causal inference — two distinct uses of randomness that are often conflated.
Distinguish what a medium feature teaches typically from what it can be made to teach - The paper argues that research questions like 'What does feature x teach?' are vague because they fail to distinguish \"what a feature teaches typically, and what it can be made to teach\".
Eight constant forms of data collected within the drawing laboratory - The methodology relies on eight kinds of data, all from events and traces within the drawing lab: dated drawings, time-lapse negatives, recalled lab notes, direct observational descriptions, transcriptions of inquiry...
Empathy Interviews - Empathy interviews are structured, open-ended conversations designed to help educators or designers understand how learners experience school, work, systems, and support.
Evidence-Centered Design - A design method for assessment that works backwards from the claim you want to make — name the competency, then the observable behaviour that would be evidence for it, then the task that elicits that behaviour.
Family-Interview-Based Assessment Task Design - A design process for building formative assessment tasks that reveal disciplinary competence (e.g., computational thinking) embedded in a specific community's everyday practices, by interviewing families to surface funds of knowledge before designing the task.
Learner Analysis - Systematically gathering information about learners' prior knowledge, skills, motivations, and constraints to inform instructional design decisions.
Learner And Context Analysis - Systematic investigation of learners' prior knowledge, characteristics, and the instructional environment before designing instruction, so that design decisions fit who will learn and where.
Learner Personas - Learner personas are evidence-based composite profiles of representative learners used to ground design decisions in real audience characteristics.
Learning Hierarchy Task Analysis - Task analysis identifies the prerequisite skills a target performance requires by repeatedly asking what a learner must already master, arranging the answers into a sequenced learning hierarchy from foundational to complex.
Logic Model - A design method that lays out the chain from a programme's activities and outputs to the outcomes it is meant to produce, so that each link can be examined, and later tested, on its own.
Make ambiguous behavioral-science constructs empirically tractable by linking them to better-behaved concepts from related nomological networks - The paper models a strategy of conceptual clarification: rather than abandoning a fertile but empirically elusive construct, link it to a concept with greater behavioral vulnerability.
Make the Invisible Visible (Power Dynamics) - A design strategy that surfaces and names power dynamics among stakeholders, making decision-making authority explicit and redistributing it across the design process.
Multimediatizing: express didactized content directly in multimedia form rather than digitizing pre-edited media - The principle of multimediatizing \"consists in the direct expression of a didactized content into a multimedia form\".
Needs Analysis - A systematic process for identifying the gap between current and desired performance and determining whether instruction is the right remedy.
Piagetian teacher behavioral congruency checklist for analyzing teaching styles - Mueller's paper translates Piagetian theory into a fifteen-item yes/no behavioral checklist covering environment organization, heterogeneous grouping, learner decision-making, cooperative interaction, active methods,...
Reciprocity inventory of learner responsiveness to mediation - A companion inventory, also emerging from thematic data analysis, classifies learner responses to mediation hierarchically.
Selecting an Instructional Design Model - Choosing, adapting or combining an instructional design model for a project. ADDIE is treated as the underlying process and each model as a context-specific instance of it, chosen by delivery format and by what the project must produce.
Stakeholder Mapping - A design method that enumerates the parties who participate in, govern, fund, or are affected by a learning activity, gives each a stable identity, and records only the relationships that change a design decision.
Standards Crosswalk - Deriving a course's goal tree from an external framework — a standards set, competency model or certification blueprint — and carrying the framework's own codes through objectives, activities and assessment items so that coverage and provenance stay traceable in both directions.
Synthesists should be rigorously transparent in design, write-up and provision of supplementary materials so others can check, replicate or modify syntheses - A design recommendation for research synthesis methodology: because bias is inherent in primary research and many synthesist choices are glossed over, the article urges that \"Synthesists need to be rigorously transpar...
Task Analysis - A systematic method for breaking down a complex skill or task into its component knowledge, skills, and decision points so instruction can be designed around what learners actually need to master.
Taxonomy of ten symbolic representation types for heat and temperature in high school science textbooks - An appendix study applied and modified Hooper's mathematics taxonomy to symbolic representations of heat and temperature in three widely used LAUSD physical science textbooks.
Theory of Change - A design method that reasons backward from a desired long-term outcome to the preconditions it requires, making explicit both the links the design controls and the assumptions it depends on but does not.
Three-set coding scheme (group, grade level, subject area) with column-aligned codes and group indexes - Each resource entry carries three sets of codes on its last line: group codes (e.g., AA Asian American, BA Black American, MF Minority Female, H Handicapped), grade-level codes (E elementary, J junior high, H high sch...
Two-step fuzzy forecasting pattern: fuzzylise the universe, then interpret the fuzzy output - The article organizes fuzzy forecasting as a reusable two-step procedure.
Use AMOVA to add validity and reliability assessment value for researcher-designed instruments, with further substantiating research - The article recommends AMOVA as a post hoc addition to instrument validation practice, claiming it \"adds considerable value to the methods designed to assess instrument validity and reliability especially when said in...
Use fuzzy forecasting when historical data are scarce but experience knowledge is available, because the method tolerates imperfect data - The article recommends fuzzy time series forecasting where accurate historical data are hard to obtain, because experience knowledge can be used \"from thevery beginning until theend of the whole forecasting process\".