Educational Research-Driven Software Development: An Emergent Practical Framework

Abstract

Generative AI-assisted coding may have introduced a meaningful opportunity for educational researchers with no programming experience to extend their work beyond typical scholarly outputs by creating functional software. Translating research into applications has historically required significant coding expertise, but generative AI has lowered this barrier substantially. Proposed is educational research-driven development (ERDD), an emergent conceptual cross-disciplinary framework combining the educational research process with the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to produce executable scholarship deployable directly to stakeholders. A cross-disciplinary process comparison revealed similarities and differences between the two fields, producing a unified set of scholar-coder workflow steps and two researcher postures: the Sequential Posture, which concludes research before development begins, and the Integrated Posture, which runs both processes in deliberate tandem. Importantly, ERDD has not been validated with rigorous research, and its generalizability has yet to be established. An applied workflow example is demonstrated from the perspective of a non-technical scholar-coder producing a functional web application for educators to record student mental health observational data. The application is accessible at: https://mlittrell-ttu.github.io/mlittrell.github.io/mwb-tracker.html