How to Design Experimental Research Studies around Digital Badges

Digital badging is becoming more popular in an assortment of disciplines, both academic and professional. Along with the success of practical badging initiatives, badging research is also moving at a rapid pace, a rate of change that may be intimidating to the uninitiated wishing to study them. However, there is a great need for additional research in light of the complexity of badging and the many contexts in which badging occurs. This paper outlines an approach to designing research studies around digital badges to assist researchers who are new to the field and looking to contribute. It begins by discussing how to form relevant research questions and how to approach the literature review, providing useful references as starting points. It then continues on to experimental design recommendations, discusses useful practices during experimentation, and concludes with recommendations for data analysis. Additionally, this paper describes challenges that are specific to badging and places them in context of the research design process. Multiple examples are provided to clarify these concepts.