ABSTRACT
The design research presented in this volume provides a glimpse, admittedly partial, of how the field has advanced over the past two decades or so in identifying and creating optimal conditions for promoting high-end learning and intellectual growth. The goal of this epilogue is to synthesize advances and identify challenges in design research particularly aimed at enhancing deep understanding, authentic problem solving, and critical and creative thinking. Design research as a whole goes through iterative cycles of designing, enacting, testing, and optimizing that intertwine with one another to enable sustained innovation and improvement of both educational theory and practice (Bereiter, 2002; Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004; Dai, this volume). Accordingly, this epilogue revisits and discusses four issues based on the work presented in the different chapters: (a) how a design is conceptualized; (b) how it is enacted to produce real advances; (c) how it is tested to demonstrate its efficacy as well as reveal its constraints and challenges; and (d) how it is formatively improved based on data collected and may be further optimized for better results.
