My name is Amin Bayat Barooni, and I am a Ph.D. of PER and visiting instructor at Georgia State University (GSU). My research has focused on assisting instructors (specifically instructors who teach in the studio classes) who want to design their own physics activities using research-based activities. These instructors may discover that no PER-based activity completely meets their instructional objectives. After interviewing the designers of different research-based activities, we analyzed the design strategies used in their research-based activities, investigating the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) lab report 2014 to develop a reliable coding scheme. I used this coding scheme to study 66 different research-based activities from 11 various research-based curricula and investigated these results using K-means cluster analysis. The best results were found when the activities were grouped into three separate clusters: Thinking like a scientist, Learning concepts, and Building models. Thinking like a scientist's activities concentrates on students conducting scientific practices. Learning concept activities focus on conceptual change theory. Building model activities focus on encouraging students to solve conceptually complex problems.