Action Research
As teachers, we continually make small adjustments to improve our classroom practices. This is typically an informal process where we make mental notes as we track the effects of the day-to-day changes we implement. There is also a formal method for making changes in our classrooms and researching their effects. It is called Action Research and uses a systematic documented process that includes several steps:
- Identify the specific situation in your classroom that you want to improve,
- Find information from peer-reviewed research about the topic to guide your plan,
- Decide a change to make to your instruction or other classroom practice to address the issue,
- Implement that change over a sufficient period of time to determine its effects,
- Collect data throughout that time,
- Analyze the data to determine the success of the change, and
- Based on the findings, determine whether the change you made has resolved the issue or if you should begin another cycle of action research to explore another strategy to address the situation.
As you can see, the cycle of action research can be repeated over time, allowing you to fine-tune the adjustments you make to your classroom practice, and to ultimately find the best solution to address any situation. Documenting the process provides a written record to guide your decisions and to share with your colleagues.
Let’s Look at an Example of Action Research:
Louis noticed that during mathematics lessons in his fifth-grade classroom, a few of his students stopped paying attention after about 10 minutes of instruction. He believed some of the students found the new concepts he was teaching difficult to understand, while other students were distracted because they were bored. After reading a few research articles about student engagement, Louis wondered if student attention would improve if he had them work some examples of the concepts he was teaching during the lesson. He decided to apply this change in the lessons for the next mathematics unit, using action research, and he began making notes about how he would implement that change.
As he taught the next unit, he had the students do seatwork at more frequent intervals than he had in the past. At the end of each lesson, he recorded his observations about the level of student engagement, as well as which students became disengaged while he was teaching and at what point in the lesson it occurred. At the end of the unit, he reviewed his observation notes and concluded that, overall, the change in lesson design did improve student engagement during instruction. He also decided to make a couple of additional changes in the future to see if they would further improve student engagement. First, he wanted to try having the students do the seat work in pairs. After that he wanted to explore the effects of longer seatwork assignments on student engagement.
When conducting action research, it is important to avoid making multiple changes in the classroom at that time so you can isolate the effects of the change you are studying. Sometimes we cannot control the number of changes that take place in our classrooms. New students may be added to your class, building administrators may ask teachers to make classroom changes that could influence the findings of your action research, and so forth. If it is necessary to make multiple changes to the classroom during an action research study, make some effort to try to separate the effects of each of the changes, or start the action research process over if necessary.
We must keep in mind that any findings from action research apply only to the students who were in the classroom during the process. We cannot generalize our findings by assuming they will apply to all students in similar classrooms. However, the findings may be useful to your colleagues who teach the same students and as a guide for classroom practices for future groups of students in your classroom.
Think About It
Camille is a high school social studies teacher. She has noticed that if a student needs to talk to her before class starts, it sometimes takes several minutes to handle the matter and then the rest of the class has not settled down and is not ready to learn when the bell rings. It can take quite a bit of time until she has their attention and can begin instruction. She is looking for ways to prevent this by changing the routine when the students arrive in the classroom.
Describe an action research study the teacher could conduct to address it. Include:
- a statement of the issue that needs to be studied,
- a description of one change that could be implemented to address the issue,
- data that could be collected to determine if the change was effective, and
- a description of how the data could be analyzed to determine if the change was effective.
Action research is a process that educators use to systematically evaluate and improve teaching practices.
