Design Research for Driving Insight: Iterative Interventions for Understanding Automobile Safety Systems

• In Event: 65.041 - Design-Based Research: Coming of Age for a Versatile Methodology Supporting Diverse Research and Learner Needs

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
How can design-based research be used as a framework for creating open educational resources (OERs), if at all? Can experimental studies be generative components of an iterative design-based research (DBR) investigation? Historically peripheral to DBR logics of inquiry, these questions emerge in the context of an incipient project to create OER for automobile drivers. A partnership with the National Safety Council and the National Automobile Driving Simulator, this project supports drivers’ development coherent mental models of automated driver assistance systems (ADASs), like adaptive cruise control (ACC) mechanisms.

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework
Tensions exist between many DBR frameworks and the OER movement. Design-based research is founded upon the rigorous, iterative study of learning interventions in the richness and complexity context (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992), while critiques of the OER paradigm focus on the common lack of context and collaboration in the design learning (see Concole et al., 2013). The relationship between DBR and experimental paradigms is also fraught, as the former criticizes the “narrow measures” of mere experimentation (Collins et al., 2004, pg. 18).

Methods
Reeves (2000) describes four main phases of DBR – problem analysis; solution development; testing and iterative refinement; and reflection for design principle – which we understand as analogous to Schön’s (1992) description of cyclical ‘seeing’ and ‘testing’ in design practice. The present inquiry draws on process data from the first two phases: problem analysis and solution development. Like many DBR studies (Sandoval, 2014), this project engages a narrow problem of design evaluation alongside larger theory building issues (Table 3.1, see consolidated document).

Data sources
Given the initial phases of the project, the papers’ data is sourced from an annotated bibliography of 72 scholarly articles on safety beliefs, notes from subject-matter expert meetings, and a literature review of 62 articles on driver safety practices.

Results and substantiated conclusions
While we expect our questions, methods and designs to change over project iterations, we present a general framework for our design-based research activity that interleaves experimental and qualitative research methodologies (Table 3.2, see consolidated document).

The research activities of the 15-month plan have the following temporal structure: context and content analysis; experimental study; sequence and system design; further experimental study; qualitative investigation; and re-development of materials; Each ‘phase’ of design, development and research is ordered to answer specific questions about one of the design research problems under examination. More importantly, studies and design activities are sequenced at critical points in the investigation that will influence the future project direction. Results from the first model elicitation study will be reported alongside analysis of the resulting changes in the overall project.

Scholarly significance
Scholars and researchers are looking more frequently toward ‘open’ learning environments, like OERS, that are publicly available (Collins & Halverson, 2009) This paper examines the relationship between design-based research and the creation of open educational resources – a relationship heretofore unexplored in the design-based research literature – engaging with core DBR issues of method, process, iteration and evaluation.

Authors

• Benjamin M Devane, The University of Iowa

• Joyce E. Moore, University of Iowa

• Ethan P. Valentine, University of Iowa