Our story
reDesignED started with a simple observation: the field of education doesn’t suffer from a shortage of research. It suffers from a shortage of useful research: knowledge that’s ready to be implemented, not just published (Reeves & Lin, 2020). Too often, the same problems of practice show up in the literature decade after decade, studied and re-studied, without producing solutions that ever make it into a classroom. That gap, between what gets published and what gets used, is what reDesignED exists to close.
The moment that crystallized this for me came while completing a three-year design-based research study at the University of Minnesota — iteratively developing and testing a set of active learning design principles across undergraduate courses, then verifying them against more than 1,000 student testimonies (Reilly & Reeves, 2024). That study demonstrated something I hadn’t seen argued clearly enough elsewhere: that research could directly improve practice and advance theoretical insight, in the same study, at the same time. That dual outcome — not research in service of practice someday, but research and practice advancing together, now — became the founding premise of reDesignED.
This dual outcome, I’d argue, is exactly what this moment in education requires. Aligning curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to genuinely learner-centered approaches isn’t a problem you solve by publishing another framework and hoping it gets adopted. It’s a design problem; one that has to be worked out iteratively, in real classrooms, with the educators who teach and the students who learn.
Founded in April 2024 and based in Minnesota, reDesignED is a nonpartisan education design research lab working at the intersection of learning sciences, instructional design, and educational practice. We don’t just study problems or hand off recommendations; we bring together researchers, designers, educators, students, and community members to design interventions together, test them in real classrooms, and refine them based on what the evidence shows.
How we work
We treat teaching and learning as a design science: a discipline where solving real problems and building generalizable knowledge happen together, not in sequence. This approach is known in the field as educational design research (EDR) — grounded in decades of learning sciences research on situated cognition (Brown et al., 1989; Hoadley, 2004; Lave & Wenger, 1991), which holds that learning is shaped by the context in which it happens, so solutions have to be designed within that context, not separate from it.
Much of our work sits inside what the field calls improvement science — disciplined, iterative inquiry carried out in networked communities of researchers and practitioners who share a specific problem of practice. Our published research follows the same dual-outcome model: the Refining active learning design principles study produced both a practical rubric for measuring active learning in course design and a peer-reviewed set of design principles now available for others to use. The Tracking transdisciplinary skills study produced a practical outcomes mapping tool alongside published, evidence-based guidance on how to track higher-order skills alongside disciplinary standards.
Two commitments run through everything we do:
Full vertical integration. We work the whole arc — defining problems with the people who live them, designing interventions grounded in research, field-testing, gathering data on what works, and helping proven solutions spread and sustain.
Evidence you can check. Our design interventions are grounded in peer-reviewed research, and our studies are evidenced by existing criteria for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies (eg. reliability, validity, credibility, transferability, dependability, confirmability). We publish in peer-reviewed journals and share our findings in the creative commons for the benefit of the wider community.
Why now
Widening achievement gaps, declining engagement, and fast-moving technology aren’t problems that get solved by research and policy alone. They need the same kind of disciplined, iterative attention we’d expect from any other field trying to solve complex problems — grounded in evidence, built with the people affected, and honest about what still doesn’t work. It will take a community to address these challenges. Together, we can reDesign education.