Pragmatic design-based research – Designing as a shared activity of teachers and researches

Answering the problems arising from the school context, science education research engages in diminishing the gap between educational theory and practice. Design-based research aims to develop an educational innovation, i.e. a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) that helps teachers and students in science classes to reach the objectives indicated in a curriculum. A pragmatic design-based research project starts in a situation where neither teachers nor researchers know how to act in certain settings. Design-based research constructs novel situations in order to research these situations and better understand teaching and learning. We emphasise the importance of engaging ordinary teachers in collaborative designing and validation of teaching-learning sequences. This collaborative design and validation of TLS is a way to seriously take into consideration the requirements of the school site. Therefore, we argue here that engaging teachers in shared design and validation activities would make it plausible that designed teaching-learning sequences would be widely adoptable.