Huang, David Junsong

This symposium proposes a genre of learning designs called Student-Generated Ideas (SGIs), based on designing learning contexts that promote students as critical producers, distributors, and consumers of knowledge. SGIs place students’ ideas at the center of learning designs, considering the learning process as well as the learning goals/outcomes. By soliciting and foregrounding students’ diversified ideas in the classroom and beyond, the learning environment communicates to students that their ideas matter to others and that they have a position of responsibility to their own and their peers’ learning processes. The notion of SGIs is embodied in a repertoire of studies at the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore, that offer varied yet overlapping interpretations of how student ideas can inform the design of learning contexts. In sharing the core design principles for SGIs approaches, this work contributes important components to the learning sciences discipline and changing educational practice.

This paper seeks to draw from contemporary understandings of translation science to highlight and elaborate upon possible norms and procedures which the authors have found to be critical in the successful extension and scaling of design-based research interventions in education into wider practitioner-based adoption and adaptation. The impetus for this interrogation is the desire to mediate the tensions which sometimes arise between researcher, practitioner, and other stakeholders in educational research – such as policy-makers and funding agencies. It is hoped that these explications will contribute to the as yet nascent body of literature on translation science as applied to innovation in education.

If school diffusion of innovation is viewed as complex adaptive process, how shall we prepare school leaders to be effective diffusion decision makers? Coming from the epistemological belief that knowledge is subjective and embodied, this paper proposes to use Agent Based Modeling (ABM) for learning by focus on learning to “do” diffusion of innovation rather than learning about diffusion of innovation. We therefore recommend to engage school leaders in iterative agent based model development process and to couple it with their interaction in real world diffusion system. With feedback from real world system used for iterative model calibration and validation, the affordances of the agent based model allow school leaders to participate, experience, appropriate, perform and therefore to learn to make effective diffusion decisions in their schools.

Research on Productive Failure and preparatory mechanisms has consistently demonstrated a positive learning effect when students generate problem solutions before receiving formal instruction. However, it has been less examined whether the effect still holds when the generative task does not involve problem solving. Using a 2x2 experimental design, this study investigated the effects of generative tasks that involve analogical problem posing (without solving) on learning and transfer. Pedagogical sequence (i.e., generation-first or instruction-first) and type of analogical reasoning task (i.e., generating one’s own analogical problems or generating analogical mappings between given analogical problems) were the two factors manipulated. Preliminary analysis revealed no multivariate effects of the factors. Thus, we discuss the learning mechanisms enacted by analogical reasoning, reliability of the instruments, and the participants’ prior condition as possible reasons and to inform future studies.

This article provides an overview of research in the Learning Sciences from a Design Research perspective, as it has been framed in Singapore by the National Institute of Education (NIE). The initial research agenda is considered in the light of challenges and the subsequent re-casting of objectives, based on the working out of a tripartite relationship between the NIE, the Ministry of Education, and local schools. A conceptual model is proposed as an attempt to provide structure for new research interventions going forward.

Research management is an emerging field of study and its development is significant to the advancement of research enterprise. Developing the science of research management requires investigating social mechanisms involved in research management. Yet, studies on social mechanisms of research management is lacking in the literature. To address this gap, this paper proposes importing methodologies and theories from other social science disciplines to study the social mechanisms of research management and to build the science of research management. The paper first articulates what constitutes the science of research management, then proposes to appropriate Design-Based Research (DBR), a methodology in education research, for building the science of research management while at the same time strengthening the theory-practice nexus. A study of education research is then presented to illustrate how DBR is used to enact the theory of homophily which is imported from sociology. It reveals an opportunity to use social designs to develop social relationships among teachers from different schools for networked learning. Such a research endeavour also has potential to advance theories of relationship-building in sociology. Inferring from the example as an analogue to what is suggested for research management, the paper advocates a way to reciprocally connect research management as an emerging research field with more established social science disciplines at large and to advance both the theory and practice of research management.