Refining nascent interventions through emergent design evaluation

Evaluating nascent educational interventions requires a specific kind of evaluation theory. This paper provides a case example of the emergent design evaluation approach, one theory created for use with developing interventions, but that has limited examples within published literature for practitioners to learn from. The emergent design evaluation theory was used to evaluate the design and implementation of a high school biology unit integrating computational thinking and neural engineering, including teacher professional development and a web-based application. A contribution of this paper, beyond the case example it provides, is that the emergent design evaluation was combined with design-based research, a complementary approach. Consistent with the practices uniquely characteristic of emergent design evaluation, this paper describes critical points or key occasions in which aspects of the intervention influence the evaluation process, or vice versa, including the nature and direction of influence. By demonstrating the process of combining emergent design evaluation and design-based research, this paper adds to discussions within the field about how to intentionally weave together different knowledge generation approaches that both meet evaluation demands and align with the evaluation context.