Book details. Product No. ISBN Release Date May Page Count. Member Book Yes. Topics in this book. Professional Learning. The process begins when you identify a question or problem you want to address. Action research is most successful when you have a personal investment, so make sure the questions you are asking are ones YOU want to solve.
This could be an improvement you want to see happen in your classroom or your school if you are a principal , or a problem you and your colleagues would like to address in your district. Learning to develop the right questions takes time. Your ability to identify these key questions will improve with each iteration of the research cycle.
Choose questions that can be answered within the context of your daily teaching. In other words, choose a question that is both answerable and worthy of the time investment required to learn the answer. Questions you could ask might involve management issues, curriculum implementation, instructional strategies, or specific student performance. For example, you might consider:.
Before you can start collecting data, you need to have a clear vision of what success looks like. Start by brainstorming words that describe the change you want to see. What strategies do you already know that might help you get there?
Which of these ideas do you think might work better than what you are currently doing? To find out if a new instructional strategy is worth trying, conduct a review of literature. The important thing is to explore a range of articles and reports on your topic and capitalize on the research and experience of others.
Your classroom responsibilities are already many and may be overwhelming. A review of literature can help you identify useful strategies and locate information that helps you justify your action plan. The Web makes literature reviews easier to accomplish than ever before. Even if the full text of an article, research paper, or abstract is not available online, you will be able to find citations to help you locate the source materials at your local library.
Collect as much information on your problem as you can find. As you explore the existing literature, you will certainly find solutions and strategies that others have implemented to solve this problem. You may want to create a visual map or a table of your problems and target performances with a list of potential solutions and supporting citations in the middle.
Now that you have identified the problem, described your vision of how to successfully solve it, and reviewed the pertinent literature, you need to develop a plan of action.
What is it that you intend to DO? Brainstorming and reviewing the literature should have provided you with ideas for new techniques and strategies you think will produce better results. Refer back to your visual map or table and color-code or reorder your potential solutions. You will want to rank them in order of importance and indicate the amount of time you will need to spend on these strategies.
How can you implement these techniques? How will you? Translate these solutions into concrete steps you can and will take in your classroom. Write a description of how you will implement each idea and the time you will take to do it.
Once you have a clear vision of a potential solution to the problem, explore factors you think might be keeping you and your students from your vision of success. Recognize and accept those factors you do not have the power to change—they are the constants in your equation.
Focus your attention on the variables—the parts of the formula you believe your actions can impact. Develop a plan that shows how you will implement your solution and how your behavior, management style, and instruction will address each of the variables.
Before you begin to implement your plan of action, you need to determine what data will help you understand if your plan succeeds, and how you will collect that data. Your target performances will help you determine what you want to achieve. What results or other indicators will help you know if you achieved it?
For example, if your goal is improved attendance, data can easily be collected from your attendance records. If the goal is increased time on task, the data may include classroom and student observations. There are many options for collecting data.
Choosing the best methodologies for collecting information will result in more accurate, meaningful, and reliable data. Obvious sources of data include observation and interviews. As you observe, you will want to type or write notes or dictate your observations into a cell phone, iPod, or PDA. You may want to keep a journal during the process, or even create a blog or wiki to practice your technology skills as you collect data.
Reflective journals are often used as a source of data for action research. You can also collect meaningful data from other records you deal with daily, including attendance logs, grade reports, and student portfolios.
You could distribute questionnaires, watch videotapes of your classroom, and administer surveys. Examples of student work are also performances you can evaluate to see if your goal is being met. Create a plan for data collection and follow it as you perform your research.
Action research aims to generate findings that are useful within a specific context rather than findings applicable across many different situations. Similarly, the basis for judging validity in action research is different from that used in research in general. In general research, validity is measured by the extent to which the research actually investigates what it is supposed to investigate, and because of this, research design and data analysis procedures are crucial.
In action research, on the other hand, validity can be measured by the extent to which the research produces findings which are useful in developing the classroom situation. This shift in perceptions concerning the nature and purposes of research means that action research, which may not be publishable when judged by the criteria of research in general, is publishable as action research see Edge, ; Sitler and Tezel, ; Watson Todd, for recent examples of published action research.
However, the number of publications focusing on action research is limited meaning that publishability is actually still low. Publishing an article, however, should not be a teacher's top priority when deciding to conduct action research. More important is the likely effect that conducting the action research will have on the classroom situation and the teacher-researcher. Action research for development In conducting action research, teachers can become emancipated Gore and Zeichner, , in that they become in control of the whole process of research and investigation of their own teaching, rather than being the tool of an outside researcher.
Teachers, then, can become more autonomous, responsible and answerable through action research Day, , and so decisions concerning change can be taken by teachers themselves. One outcome of this is that action research is likely to be relevant and immediately useful in understanding and developing the specific classroom context in which it was conducted, and so of benefit to learners.
Another outcome is that the research becomes both an input into and a stimulus for teacher reflection indeed, teacher reflection is one of the key tools in conducting action research , and reflection is a necessary component of personal and professional development.
Conducting action research, then, is one key way for us to develop ourselves as teachers. As teachers, it is our duty to develop both our teaching and ourselves. Action research can help us to fulfil these responsibilities. Because of this, conducting action research should not be seen as something extra that keen teachers can do which goes beyond their usual teaching responsibilities. Instead, conducting action research should be seen as an integral part of our responsibilities as professionals dedicated to developing our teaching and ourselves.
References Allwright, D. In Edge, J. Oxford: Heinemann. Brown, H. Burton, J. Day, C. In Smyth, J.
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