My Reflection on Tabak's Article

You will see in my other post that I took this article and clustered the information in an outline form. It helps me to dissect topics like this, but it takes a lot of time and so I am late in getting it posted after working on over a few days. However, I was interested in the studies presented here as I am interested in doing classroom research. Therefore, I did get some understanding beyond some of the new terminology after a few reads through and putting the content in bulletized form.

I like the way that Tabak defines design-based research methods, especially concerning exogenous versus endogenous, and how they apply to classroom research. This helped me to understand the study and the basis for some of the actions during the research, as well the his perspectives in his conclusions. I think that this is the point of this collection of articles and their Design-Based Research Collective.

Tabak informs us that design-based research methods is a term used to describe a particular stance taken to design-based and intervention-based studies of learning in naturalistic settings (e.g. classrooms) and then explains exogenous and endogenous design (p. 225):

• Exogenous design refers to instructional materials, activity structures, or instructional strategies that have been developed
  for the purposes of the research. Exogenous design predominantly reflects the researchers’ or “outsider’s” voice (cf. Fishman, Marx, Blumenfeld, Krajcik, & Soloway, 2004). (p. 225)
• Endogenous design refers to the set of materials and practices that are already in place in the local setting. It also refers to
  those devised by the local participants “in-action” as part of the enactment. (p. 225)
• The boundary between exogenous and endogenous design can be vague. (p. 225)

This is nice compared to other articles where it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the terminology and how the author applies this to the study.

Resource:
Tabak, I. (2004). Reconstructing context: Negotiating the tension between exogenous and
endogenous educational design. Educational Psychologist, 39 (4), 225-233.