Research Designs for Studying Individual and Collaborative Learning with Digital Badges

Web-enabled digital badges are quickly transforming the way that individual and collaborative learning is supported, recognized, and assessed in digital learning contexts. Badges contain specific claims and evidence supporting those claims and they have the potential to also transform the way that researchers study learning. Because digital badges are so new, there are few examples or models for studying them or using them to study learning. This paper introduces six research designs for studying learning with digital badges that emerged in a study of thirty projects funded to develop digital badges in a 2012 competition. These principles distinguish between summative, formative, and “transformative” research, and between using conventional forms of evidence and using the evidence contained in digital badges.