Welcome to Educational Designer #19
This issue constitutes my first regular issue as Editor-in-Chief. While we were busy working on the two-part Special Issue on Design for Justice and Belonging, a strong collection of regular submissions also came into the journal. We begin with two contributions from Bill Penuel and colleagues, representing different lessons learned for effective designing from the OpenSciEd Project, a fascinating endeavor to produce open-source materials that support ambitious science instruction reforms and yet could be widely adopted within the highly heterogeneous US context. The first examines how they resolved key design dilemmas when students work with real science data. The second examines how the larger team organized, designed, and developed to be relevant to various local stakeholders while maintaining the impact promised in the adoption of the new science standards. The paper by Nyaema and colleagues follows up on the topic of designing for the new science standards by describing how they used to design frameworks to guide lesson design, particularly with the goal of supporting students in transferring knowledge to new contexts. The last two papers shift the focus to hot topics. The fourth paper, in the context of reform computer science instruction, examines the ways in which teachers need to adapt curriculum materials even when the materials were co-designed with the teacher. The fifth paper examines the ways in which Generative AI can be used to support lesson design, a topic that will likely be examined in great depth in the coming years.
I am very excited by the strong and future-oriented work represented in this issue. Please keep sending us such content!
Editor in Chief
Christian Schunn
Balancing Design Goals for Supporting Students’ Work with Extant Data in Science
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This paper examines design decisions of a team seeking to support students’ working with data in a standards-based high school biology curriculum. The team’s decisions required them to balance four goals that often came into tension during development: (1) helping students meet performance expectations specified in the targeted standards; (2) engaging students with extant datasets; (3) supporting student sensemaking; and (4) supporting coherence from the student point of view. Efforts to balance these goals in design revealed the limitations of existing science standards for adequately supporting students’ work with extant datasets and for developing students’ skill in covariational reasoning. Achieving the goals of supporting student sensemaking in science requires more intensive support for building the conceptual foundations of statistical concepts when developing a grasp of the practice of using mathematics in science.
Penuel, W.R., Rubin, A., Puttick, G., Henson, K., Deverel-Rico, C. (2025)
Balancing Design Goals for Supporting Students’ Work with Extant Data in Science.
Educational Designer, 5(19). ISSN 1759-1325
Retrieved from:
http://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume5/issue19/article78/
Organizing Development and Adaptation Studies for Relevance and Impact
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Calls for research to be more relevant to practice persist, despite extensive efforts over the past two decades, because most research efforts remain unresponsive to the concerns of decision makers and educators and fail to anticipate the diverse goals and contexts of practice. We present five heuristics for organizing development and adaptation studies to improve relevance and impact in the context of a project that developed and tested a set of free, standards-aligned instructional materials in high school science with associated professional development. The five heuristics are: (1) be adaptive while also attending to history; (2) anchor design activities in a vision for equitable disciplinary teaching and learning; (3) maintain continuous attunement to interest holders’ concerns; (4) design for productive adaptation; and (5) develop evidence of changed relations and of multiple potential future uses of the products and findings from the research and development effort. We argue that more studies are needed that adhere to these heuristics and we consider conditions that would need to be in place for other kinds of development and adaptation studies to succeed. We conclude by articulating the kinds of research questions that might follow design and adaptation projects such as ours.
Penuel, W.R., Pazera, C., Buck Bracey, Z., Edelson D.C., Henson, K., Reiser, J., Sumner, T,
Vick, N., Ryan, J., Watkins, D. (2025)
Organizing Development and Adaptation Studies for Relevance and Impact.
Educational Designer, 5(19). ISSN 1759-1325
Retrieved from:
http://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume5/issue19/article79/
Designing Innovative and Equitable Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Resources Aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards: Transfer and Alignment as a Means of Overcoming Design Challenges
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Educators today are questioning the viability of instructional approaches and assessments that do not directly support students to flexibly transfer their learning to new contexts. It is important to develop educational resources that align instruction with assessment, which in turn enable students to think as scientists and engineers as they encounter phenomena and design solutions to problems. To overcome these challenges, Principled Assessment Design (PAD) and Understanding by Design (UbD) frameworks have been used to show how clarity and coherence within and across standards-based assessment and classroom contexts can be achieved. However, there are challenges in mapping the two approaches due to the domain-specific nature of PAD as opposed to the more comprehensive nature of the UbD process. In this paper, we discuss how transfer and alignment to learning goals informed design decisions that were made to integrate the benefits present in each model. The resultant resources are geared at providing equitable and accessible learning opportunities and assessments for all students. Further recommendations about the quality and usefulness of these resources are made based on feedback received from parents, educators, and administrators across several states.
Nyaema, M.K., Wink, D.J., Buchanan, E., Zaidi, Z. (2025)
Designing Innovative and Equitable Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Resources Aligned
with the Next Generation Science Standards: Transfer and Alignment as a Means of Overcoming
Design Challenges.
Educational Designer, 5(19). ISSN 1759-1325
Retrieved from:
http://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume5/issue19/article80/
Teacher Adaptations in the Implementation of a Co-Designed Curriculum
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While innovations co-designed with teachers show positive outcomes, implementation of co-designed innovations and adaptations made by teacher co-designers during implementation are less examined. This paper explores how teacher co-designers adapt lesson materials when teaching and the factors leading to adaptations. Teachers made adaptations to increase support for students due to characteristics of the innovation, users, and environment. These contextualized and in-the-moment adaptations were in addition to design decisions made during co-designing. The findings point to potential differences in how teachers perceive student needs in design sessions compared with when teaching. This work supports future co-design with teachers by increasing understanding of the adaptations made to a co-designed curriculum and the reasons for these adaptations so that design conversations can support goal-aligned, student-supportive adaptations.
Coenraad, M. (2025)
Teacher Adaptations in the Implementation of a Co-Designed Curriculum.
Educational Designer, 5(19). ISSN 1759-1325
Retrieved from:
http://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume5/issue19/article81/
Using Generative AI to Design Differentiated Learning in a General Education Course
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This design case explores an instructor's experience redesigning her course using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools to facilitate differentiated learning. The course is part of a general education program that draws students from various disciplines, aiming to create unique, interdisciplinary learning experiences that allow each student to engage meaningfully with the content. The redesign process followed the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) model, incorporating differentiated instructional strategies that leverage GenAI for tasks such as researching current leadership trends, crafting learning outcomes, outlining content, and creating assessments tailored to students' diverse mastery levels. This design case reflects on the decisions made during the course redesign process, presents some impact assessments, and discusses critical factors affecting implementation.
Chong, H.N. (2025)
Using Generative AI to Design Differentiated Learning in a General Education Course.
Educational Designer, 5(19). ISSN 1759-1325
Retrieved from:
http://www.educationaldesigner.org/ed/volume5/issue19/article82/