Conjecture Maps for Learning Experience Design (Poster 3)

• In Event: From Research to Application: Learning Engineering as a Process for Learning-Sciences-Informed Educational Design

Abstract

Two of the most difficult parts of learning design are (a) connecting intentions, theories and approaches, and design choices and (b) keeping a running account of the intended embodiment of a design. Conjecture maps were proposed by Bill Sandoval in 2014 as a way to keep track of decisions made in the context of design research. In design research, researchers simultaneously evaluate new ways of supporting learning and produce new understandings of how to support learning and how people learn. A conjecture map (see Figure 1 below) is used to make connections between (a) the high-level hypothesis about how to support learning being tested in the research (the high-level conjecture), (b) the design decisions made in the context of designing the learning activities and resources (embodiment), (c) justifications for those decisions (largely from the literature; design conjectures), (d) expectations about what will happen as a result of implementing the designed activities in the designed environment (mediating processes), (e) ultimate outcomes (both short and long term), and (f) what leads us to believe those outcomes will happen (also largely from the literature; theoretical conjectures).

Figure 1: The general form of a conjecture map. From Sandoval (2014)

A conjecture map documents what researchers expect from implementing their designs and why they expect that. As they move into the next iteration, they document on another conjecture map the changes they are making to the design, why they made those changes, and what they are learning given the results, allowing both iterations towards a design that better achieves their goals and data to support answering their research questions.
Our organization has repurposed conjecture maps to systematically keep track of high-level connections between conjectures, design decisions, and outcomes as we follow the Learning Engineering Design Process (Authors, 2022). Instead of a high-level conjecture about supporting learning and several smaller conjectures about design and theory, we develop three high-level conjectures to guide our designs: a learning conjecture, an engagement conjecture, and an impact conjecture, each of which connects theories and approaches that are guiding our design choices to outcomes and impacts we want our designs to produce.
We aim for designs that synthesize the interplay between all three conjectures rather than simply including components that achieve each. Drawing arrows from each of the three conjectures to parts of the embodiment allows envisioning the extent to which each of the conjectures is reified in the imagined design and the extent to which those designs fully integrate the achievement of the goals in the three conjectures. This allows us to connect designs to intentions and the research literature, keep track of changes in the framing of a design, provide a vehicle for communicating with teammates and clients, and provide documentation for others who join a team or keep up the design over its lifetime.

Author

• Janet L. Kolodner, Georgia Institute of Technology