“Through generations, the dap has expressed unity, strength, defiance or resistance… From the “high-five” to the “fist bump,” Americans of all colors use versions of these gestures of solidarity today.”
from: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/gestures-solidarity-african-american-culture
We are the Design& Partnership Lab
— or affectionately the daplab — directed by Dr. June Ahn at the University of California, Irvine.
Our lab focuses on designing and studying new innovations for Education. We do this in a few ways:
Design
We design new innovations for learning that range from new technologies to curricular programs and educational systems (e.g. district programs, instructional coaching systems etc.).
We have designed, prototyped and studied a wide variety domains including:
- social media applications for children
- online learning communities
- open badges
- games for learning
- formative assessment systems and practical measures
- data visualization platforms
- AI chatbots and large-language models for learner assessment
Design Based Research
We draw upon design-research and co-design from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Design-Based Research to test educational theories from the Learning Sciences (LS).
In these traditions, the process of research pays attention to the designed elements of a new technology or educational program, builds prototypes of these ideas, and then carefully tests out how these prototypes work in the world.
Through this process, we seek to test theories and refine ideas for how to improve learning. We may collect and analyze data to research these ideas in a variety of ways from qualitative case studies of new innovations to quasi-experimental and experimental evaluations of impact.
Partnerships: Community Engaged Research
A major part of the daplab identity is to conduct research in collaboration with partners. We draw upon traditions of Co-Design from HCI, drawing heavily on the work of Dr. Allison Druin (and colleagues) who was an influential mentor for Dr. Ahn.
In addition, Dr. Ahn’s work builds from his doctoral training in Education Policy, with Dr. Dominic Brewer (who is Dean Emerita at NYU and former VP of RAND Corporation). This training influences the daplab perspective of designing for the organizational, ecological, and sociocultural activity systems that shape educational experiences.
While a lot of educational technology work focuses on individual (cognitive) or group (social) levels, we also attend to the systemic realities of our educational partners. Often school leaders, teachers, and students must not only design for individual needs, but also for the constraints of the societal, economic, political, gendered, or racial systems they learn within.
Designing and researching in partnership with community members is a key element of our lab identity (hence daplab). We are actively involved in traditions of Research-Practice Partnerships and Design-Based Implementation Research, which blend a focus on co-design with deep, partnering methods, in the process of conducting education research.
In addition to the daplab, Dr. Ahn founded the UCI OCEAN center that promotes partnership research on campus. Students are encouraged to also join in on OCEAN activities to learn about research-practice partnerships.