Conjecture Mapping Design and Theoretical Conjectures Explicitly to a Funding Audience

• In Event: Conjecture Mapping: New Approaches to Broadening Processes of Educational Design Research

Abstract

Purpose:
Conjecture maps, as proposed by Sandoval (2014; personal communication), were meant to support design research teams internally in their work to hold developing design and theory in relation to each other. Mapping design conjectures through these representations was meant to be a support for researchers that made writing about their work clearer and more rigorous. However, in the years since conjecture maps were first introduced to the field, they have started to be used as a way to communicate design ideas from research teams to external audiences in ways that shift their structure and function. We share a case study from our work, in which a funding agency requested a conjecture map in order to clarify how the theoretical foundation of the study informed our design. This shift in audience, and purpose, influenced our decision to change the structure of our conjecture map, adding in explicit empirical and theoretical conjectures (Figure 2).

Methods & Data:
We present a case study that describes our research team’s work with using conjecture maps to communicate our design rationale to an outside audience (funding institution). We analyze the conjecture maps created by the team as their communicative purpose shifted to rationalize design decisions, explicitly outline the role that embodiments would play towards the defined mediating processes, and describe the mechanisms by which those processes would result in target outcomes.

Findings & Significance:
As proposed by Sandoval (2014) design and theoretical conjectures are implicitly represented in a conjecture map in between columns through arrows and can be read in a form of “if this then that” (p. 24). This makes sense when the audience of a conjecture map is a research team that conceptualized the study and has a shared understanding of the rationale for design decisions. However, when conjecture maps are used to communicate to new audiences, these decisions become harder to understand in this form of representation. Thus, when prompted by a funding institution to, “provide a conjecture map outlining how theories from complex systems learning, [and] embodied cognition [...] are informing your design choices and your anticipated outcomes,” we found it necessary to change the structure of a traditional conjecture map. We did this by adding columns for our design and theoretical conjectures, which elaborated on how or why one embodiment/mediating process might lead to a mediating process/outcome (Figure 2). While this map served its primary purpose as a satisfactory rationale for an external funding audience, it also served an important purpose for our internal research team. This process helped us better understand the how and why underlying the connections between embodiments, mediating processes and outcomes because it forced us to further elaborate our assumptions about the mechanisms working in our proposed design. Refining the conjecture map to communicate underlying assumptions and rationales to an external audience became an exercise in modeling (Roschelle, 2021) or fleshing out the relationships between the different components of our project.

Authors

• Lauren Vogelstein, Vanderbilt University

• Dionne Champion, University of Florida

• Aditi Wagh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology