Compare methods

	Lesson Study (Collaborative Inquiry)	Design-based Research
Field	Education	Field Methods
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2006	1992
Originator	Japanese teaching tradition; introduced to the West by Stigler, Hiebert, Lewis & colleagues	Ann L. Brown and Allan Collins (independently, 1992)
Type	Cyclical, teacher-led professional development and practitioner inquiry process	Interventionist qualitative-quantitative mixed methodology
Seminal source	Lewis, C., Perry, R., & Murata, A. (2006). How should research contribute to instructional improvement? The case of lesson study. Educational Researcher, 35(3), 3–14.	Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178.
Aliases	Jugyou Kenkyuu, Research Lesson Cycle, Collaborative Lesson Study, Japanese Lesson Study	DBR, design research, design experiment, educational design research
Related	3	6
Summary	Lesson study (jugyou kenkyuu) is a collaborative, cyclical form of teacher professional development and practitioner inquiry that originated in Japan. A team of teachers studies the curriculum, sets a shared learning goal, jointly designs a 'research lesson,' has one member teach it while the others observe students closely, and then debriefs against the evidence to revise the lesson and their understanding of teaching. Rather than improving a single lesson, its deeper aim is to build teachers' professional knowledge through disciplined, evidence-based collective inquiry.	Design-based research (DBR) is an iterative, interventionist methodology that simultaneously designs educational interventions and builds theory about how and why those interventions work in authentic, complex settings. Originating in Ann Brown's 1992 classroom experiments and Allan Collins's parallel work, DBR treats the learning environment as both the object of study and the site of theory generation, cycling through design, enactment, analysis, and redesign until both practical improvement and theoretical insight are achieved.