Refining nascent interventions through emergent design evaluation.

Area of Science:

• Educational Evaluation
• Curriculum Development
• STEM Education

Background:

• Evaluating new educational interventions necessitates specialized evaluation theories.
• The emergent design evaluation approach is designed for developing interventions but lacks published practical examples.
• Practitioners need accessible case studies to understand and apply emergent design evaluation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide a case example of the emergent design evaluation approach.
• To demonstrate the integration of emergent design evaluation with design-based research.
• To illustrate how to combine different knowledge generation approaches for educational evaluation.

Main Methods:

• Utilized emergent design evaluation to assess a high school biology unit.
• Integrated computational thinking and neural engineering concepts into the biology unit.
• Combined emergent design evaluation with design-based research for a comprehensive evaluation.

Main Results:

• The paper details critical points where the intervention and evaluation influenced each other.
• The case example illustrates the practical application of emergent design evaluation.
• The combination with design-based research provided a robust evaluation framework.

Conclusions:

• The integration of emergent design evaluation and design-based research offers a viable model for evaluating educational interventions.
• This approach addresses the need for practical guidance in evaluating complex, developing educational programs.
• The study contributes to the discourse on intentionally combining evaluation theories and research methodologies.