Section archive - Research Methods

In this article, the authors review the basic features of Design-based research (DBR). The authors describe the trends toward increasing its use, and highlight and analyze the most cited articles that focus on DBR in education. The authors conclude that DBR is being utilized increasingly in educational contexts and especially those in the United States. It seems to be especially attractive for use in K–12 contexts and with technological interventions. The increasing number of studies reported suggests that researchers and graduate students are finding ways to meet the time demands of multiple iteration studies.

This article focuses on the exploration of and an explanation of student researchers’ affect and activity in an action research project. The authors argue that the researcher group as a whole constructs a wave process and at the same time each individual researcher in the group creates a wave process that may be similar or different to that of the group. These processes shape each other, through phases of engagement and disengagement in the researcher cycle, and make the research experience richer.

This article is a reflexive account of the use of critical social theory within the author's practice as an action researcher. The author discusses how a selective deployment of key constructs from the work of Jurgen Habermas has supported my work as a second-order action researcher. The author demonstrates how these constructs can help deal with the practical and theoretical tensions faced when supporting groups of action researchers. The author focuses on one of the key issues faced by any external agent trying to work within such groups: how to avoid imposing their own agendas and interpretations.

The authors reconsider five principles: historical continuity; reflexivity; dialectics; workability; and evocativeness. These five principles are critically examined from two viewpoints. First, the authors discuss comments on the quality of the principles, referring to contemporary discussion within the philosophy of science. Second, they review some empirical action research reports in which these principles have been applied.