A "Low-Tech" Design Experiment Improving Student Work

Following Collins’ work [1,2], a design experiment had graduate music students create an on-line journal of peerreviewed articles to introduce them to the professional process. The students reported learning a great deal and the professor found that most produced work that greatly exceeded his expectations. Positive results were independent of previous computing or subject matter experience, and improvement was noted in all but the lowest performing student. 1: Design experiment Collins [1] suggests that we “begin to develop a science of education” on an experimental, rather than ad hoc basis. This science is to be a “design science” rather than an analytic one, and to achieve it we must “determine how different designs of learning environments contribute to learning, cooperation, motivation, etc.” (p. 15). We can accomplish this through the careful planning and execution of design experiments, wherein the researchers solicit the active involvement of teachers who provide the courses. To this Brown [3] adds a holistic view of learning recognizing the many interwoven aspects in any learning situation that lead to “highly interdependent outcomes of a complex social and cognitive intervention” (pp. 166-7). This complexity strongly suggests that we are unlikely to hit upon a definitive experimental intervention on our first attempt, and that success will come with a series of refined experimental prototypes. This methodology is especially well adapted to the use of technology.