Design Research with Educational Systems: Investigating and Supporting Improvements in the Quality of Mathematics Teaching and Learning at Scale

This chapter describes a partnership with four urban districts that aimed to develop an empirically grounded theory of action for improving the quality of mathematics instruction at scale. Each year, we conducted a data collection, analysis, and feedback cycle in each district that involved documenting the district's improvement strategies, collecting and analyzing data to assess how these strategies were being implemented, reporting the findings to the district, and making recommendations about how the strategies might be revised. We distinguish between two distinct levels of analysis: providing the districts with timely evidence of how their strategies were playing out in schools, and testing and elaborating the conjectures that comprise our theory of action for instructional improvement. We clarify the crucial role that two research tools played at each level of analysis: our emerging theory of action and an interpretive framework that we used to assess the potential of each district's strategies to contribute to instructional improvement. We also illustrate that our collaboration with the four districts instantiates the basic tenets of design-based implementation research and involved conducting systematic inquiry to develop theory related to improving the quality of classroom instruction and student learning at the system level.