Assessing the Design Solution

Classroom practitioners are often asked to adopt continually changing standards, to be collaborators and reflective practitioners, and to make new and evolving technologies an integral part of their practice. Understanding Problems of Practice: A Case Study in Design Research describes a process for thinking about and reflecting on innovative practice – the design research process. Each of the five phases of the design research process is exemplified by a discussion of how the authors used this process to create a technology education course for perspective secondary educators. In this chapter, the authors explore the need to assess design solution decisions and to investigate how learners respond to design decisions, if design decisions meet learner needs, and to establish the viability of the design solution. They explore recommendations in the design research literature that focus on the importance of iterative design cycles and associated strategies for completing iterative cycles. They acknowledge the role of iterative cycles but point out that time urgencies for instruction associated with classroom practice limit the classroom practitioners’ ability to conduct iterative design cycles. Recognizing the importance of assessing design solutions despite classroom practitioners’ limited ability to conduct iterative design cycles, the authors present the third phase of the design research process in which as classroom practitioners they used qualitative research methods to assess their design decisions as they simultaneously taught the online technology education course for perspective secondary educators for the first time.