Someone asked the question last night about generalizability... something along the lines of, "how do you make what you learn through formative design generalizable to other populations? Do you follow up with experimental or quasi-experimental research?"
This got me thinking about what's really going on. The implication in that question is that the variability that is necessarily introduced when the researcher and the instructor are collaborating during formative design represents the introduction of confounding variables. Each teacher may be implementing things a little bit (or a lot) differently, or even the researcher's presence may create a condition that is impacting student outcomes and can't be recreated in typical classroom settings. But you can't do without, because one of the values of formative design is that interventions shouldn't just be dropped down on practitioners, that teachers should be involved.
Maybe the real intervention, the one that has the most impact on student learning, is treating teachers like professionals and giving them control over what is happening in their classrooms. Maybe simply having a university researcher sitting down and saying, "I value your expertise. Let's work together to design an intervention that will work with your students," maybe that's what really works. Maybe it doesn't matter nearly as much what actual procedure or technique you are using with the students.
That certainly is different than saying that interventions fail because of issues with fidelity of implementation. Instead, it's saying that interventions fail when teachers are not engaged as professionals in solving problems in their classrooms. I'd love to see a large scale study in which the treatment is formative design research on an intervention and the control is a fidelity model of implementing an intervention. Maybe you should even vary the intervention being implemented, because since the intervention itself may not be the most critical factor.
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