ABSTRACT
All educational research involves design choices. For design researchers, the nature of the choice is most explicitly about the character of the designed artifact (e.g., software or learning environment) or about the students’ navigation of some content terrain (Cobb et al., 2003). Less obvious, and perhaps unconscious, are the education researcher’s beliefs about the nature of change. These beliefs affect the researcher’s choice of theoretical frame, choice of measure, and choice of analytic tool. These choices interact one with another and critically affect the way inferences are drawn (either qualitatively or quantitatively). The goal of this chapter is to highlight some of the defining features of change implicit in education research to guide design researchers as they move to quantify student growth over time. We note that the challenges posed to design researchers in modeling change afflict, equally, the modeling of change even by those with mastery of current statistical modeling formalisms. Models of change over time intersect with and are grounded in larger construct validity issues facing all education researchers that are not resolved (but at least made more explicit) by quantitative techniques.
