This chapter introduces Designed Action Sampling (DAS) as a practical way to convert everyday work into reliable learning. Rather than waiting for surveys or heavy reports, DAS creates short loops: design focused actions, do them, reflect immediately, and read the pattern together. Leaders gain timely insight; teams gain agency; the organization gains momentum. You’ll see when DAS fits, which problems it solves, and how to begin without extra budget, new headcount, or complex tools—just disciplined simplicity and clear intent.
It all started with a fascination for the power of feelings fifteen years ago (cf. Boler, 1999; Boekaerts, 2010). Could a research focus on emotional events reveal more details around how students learn? As a doctoral student, I was trying to figure out which learning experiences impacted our Master’s students in entrepreneurship the most, and why that was the case. We knew something was working really well for them, we just didn’t know enough about how or why. This became the starting point of a decade-long research method innovation journey resulting in Designed Action Sampling (DAS), a powerful and increasingly popular method for studying personal development and change as it happens. DAS draws on carefully designed emotional action, digital reflection and shared analysis. Its user base consists of mostly practitioners who use it to make learning more visible, including around 40 scholars, 400 social workers, 4,000 teachers on all levels of education and 20,000 students in secondary schools and universities.
A DAS study consists of three steps: (1) designing actions for others who then (2) take action and (3) sample the impact afterwards. Each study involves two roles; one to five study leaders and around 15-100 participants. Study leaders can be teachers, principals, professional development leaders, managers, experts, coaches or scholars. Participants can be students, teachers, employees or others who take part in a process characterized by uncertainty and learning. In the first step, the study leaders design 5-15 action-oriented tasks for a group of participants. It should be tasks deemed suitable, meaningful and developmental for them. Then the participants are invited to take action and try out the tasks in practice, and reflect in writing afterwards. All participants receive individual feedback from the study leaders on each reflection. Finally, in the third step, study leaders and participants together analyse the sample of around 75-1500 written micro-reflections. They articulate insights gained and re-design the tasks so that they might work better next time. Then it starts over again.
DAS: For what and for whom?
DAS can be used to generate deep insights whenever humans go through a change process involving uncertainty and learning. At workplaces, DAS has been used to make action learning visible among employees, often directed by the HR department or by external coaches. In education, DAS has been used primarily by teachers, educational developers and researchers, often to help people take deliberate action in the classroom and beyond. A collection of designed actions can be assigned either to teachers who experiment with new instructional strategies as a networked community of practice, or to students who engage in specific learning behaviors. DAS is especially appreciated in action-based education, such as in entrepreneurship education and vocational education.
Educational communities can use DAS to go further than simply discussing instructional strategies, to also design and implement concrete teaching and learning actions, observe the effects, and refine their practices based on micro-level real-world data and peer feedback. This method is thus suitable for those who believe that change in education happens through deliberate purposeful experimentation, by trying out new ways of teaching, scientifically documenting what happens, and iteratively improving based on empirically discernible effects.
DAS opens up the practice of research to a far wider group than the traditional academic community, turning teachers, students and professionals into active co-investigators of their own local practice. This is achieved through simplified, standardised and collaborative work processes as well as through a tailored IT tool which structures the data collection and simplifies empirical analysis. Such capacity-building through making complex research procedures widely available to practitioners in their everyday work has been labeled a democratisation of research methods (Nind et al., 2013).
Educational example uses of DAS
DAS has been used in entrepreneurship education research to establish a clinical lab where teachers and students together study how people become more entrepreneurial (Grigg, 2020; Lackéus, 2024). This is an example of when DAS is used to do participatory research with people, not on people. The students are given the role as co-investigators in their own learning processes.
DAS has also been used by around 2,000 vocational teachers in apprenticeship education (Lackéus and Sävetun, 2025). This is an example of bridging between theory and practice. It helps iron out detailed answers to the question “Learning-by-doing what?”. What do people need to do, in practice, to learn a complex profession? Sets of actions are often designed together with expert practitioners, and then checked by experienced vocational teachers before they are deployed on a group of participants.
DAS has also become popular among around 200 school developers on all education levels from preschool to university. They use DAS to lead, manage and study the impact of teacher interventions they are responsible for (Lackéus and Sävetun, 2025). Here it is the teachers who take action and reflect afterwards, often 20-50 teachers in each study. This is an example of what Nobel laureate Herbert Simon (1969) called the sciences of the artificial. Around 2,000 teachers work scientifically together in design communities of practice to shape artificial situations which they then study the outcomes of. DAS gives them a common language, a unified rigorous process and access to scientific power in the analysis of their practice. DAS can thus make the study of human-made artificial systems as scientifically robust as the study of natural systems studied in natural science (cf. Simon, 1969).
While most DAS studies are conducted by practitioners and thus remain unpublished, 19 independent DAS studies have been published so far (i.e., studies not including the core team behind DAS as co-authors). It is a heterogeneous stream of literature, comprising ten publications in ten different journals, four book chapters, three doctoral theses and three grey literature pieces. 14 of these studies are in the education sector. For details around this mostly European literature base, see Lackéus (2025).
