ABSTRACT
Phillips (2006) noted that assessing research proposals in education, and especially design research proposals, is difficult for a host of reasons. This is especially because design research does not constitute what philosophers call a “natural kind.” That is, while there are some common characteristics (as described in Chapter 3), there is no one thing that design studies are like. Indeed, we have endeavored to illustrate the healthy variety in educational design research throughout this book. It therefore follows that there is no one way to write a design research proposal. The task of writing a research proposal is a challenging one and, for many, this seems especially daunting when it comes to educational design research. With the ultimate aim of supporting the initiation of productive and useful design studies, this chapter shares important considerations surrounding the proposal writing process. It begins by briefly addressing the purpose and function of research proposals. Thereafter, adequate preparation for proposal writing is stressed, in terms of learning about the educational design research process and learning about the problems and phenomena to be studied. Next, perceiving a longerterm research project as a macro-cycle that consists of meso-and micro-cycles is discussed. This includes the notion that graduate student research proposals often focus on detailed description of micro-cycles or meso-cycles; whereas those that are submitted to funding agencies to obtain support for multi-year research undertakings often describe macro-cycles. Guidelines are presented for addressing the basic elements of any strong research proposal, from the perspective of integration with a necessarily iterative design process. The chapter concludes with a self-evaluation rubric for critiquing design research proposals.
