Fishman et al. [1] have written a chapter revolving around an alternative technique for educational researchers and practitioners. Design Based Implementation Research aims to jump the walls of traditional research regarding educational interventions and propose groundbreaking interventions that the authors claim will be effective, sustainable and scalable. They have proposed four core principles of DBIR. These include a simultaneous focus of problems, needs, and requirements of multiple stakeholders, emphasising iteration, along with collaboration; working parallely on theoretical and practical knowledge; and sustaining the changes proposed to solve the problem. While talking about the need for this approach, they have also touched upon the previously used design-based, community-based evaluation and implementation approaches that have similar practices. To make this more robust, they could have added the shortcomings of existing methods to pave the way for theirs. The proposal is solely based on the authors’ understanding of design. There is no discourse over how the authors came up with or concluded that the above mentioned four principles were fundamental. Unlike many lenses, the authors suggest that the principles need not be looked at or used individually but together. The authors propose that it be considered a “better” alternative to current methods and be evaluated relatively.
The research method followed is the study of academic literature and putting forward the proposal for the new design lens. Similar to this chapter, many citations were from the National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook itself. This may propose a positive bias towards the work of researchers associated with the Society. The chapter also brushes over some other chapters in the Yearbook that contribute to their proposed approach. Although it is made for a practical approach, the entire chapter is theoretical and vague. Adopting a case study approach where the authors studied or applied the DBIR approach in a particular context would have added value and validated their proposal. In this case study, they could have explored various research methods to incorporate users for better understanding and results.
Looking at the chapter alone, without reading the remaining chapters that the authors have called the prologue to DBIR, for a reader who does not have the same insights as the authors, this chapter is written in the air and lacks much explanation. For instance, the authors state that there are problems in the current structure of education research, but there is a lack of explanation of these problems to understand the context better. The overall writing does not have clarity. There is a lot of jargon that divides attention from the central area of focus instead of building towards it. Extension of the study by anyone other than the authors would involve their own interpretation, which may differ.
As mentioned in the writing itself, the DBIR approach is not novel. It builds on existing methods and approaches. It is instead providing an alternative perspective. Making a different perspective visible and taking it into account is an essential part of the design in general. It aligns the research with its own first principle, where different perspectives of different users are all taken into account once. Here there is one direction but alternative approaches.
Although this approach aims to make education research better, it may neither be purely specific or even general in its application, depending on the level of education and availability of resources. Such factors need to be taken into account. Moreover, there can be multiple other stakeholders than professors or students that may affect outcomes. These include the governing bodies of institutes and nations. In order to make a wider impact, it needs to be tackled, if not at a global but a national level, especially since the authors aim to tackle the broader challenge. They have addressed the same but have not discussed the roles of these stakeholders.
Although the chapter is not very informative, it does raise a critical question that researchers and designers in every industry need to address in their projects. Finding the sweet spot between theory and practice is the next step forward for academia.
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