Action Research Notes

Introducing Action Research

Essential Questions

• What do different research approaches entail?
• How does your research purpose shape decisions about your research method and methodology?

Chapter Purpose

• Deconstruct major terms and concepts related to research, method, and methodology.
• Examine factors that influence research methodology.

What It Means to Do Research

• Research is done to learn about something important or of interest.
• All research, from formal experiments to informal inquiries, has two common characteristics:
  • A conscientious process at work.
  • Undertaken for a specific purpose.
• Research is conscientious:
  • You are consciously aware that you are in a process of gathering information.
  • You've thought about the best ways to find out what you need to know.
  • You are paying careful attention to the information as it comes in.
  • You are organizing it.
  • You may even have done “researchy" things like sampling your population.
• Research is purposeful:
  • You invest time, energy, and care into gathering information because you have a reason to do it.
  • Your research process has a goal.
• All research is the same at its most fundamental level: you want to know something and you work to find it out.
• The loftiness or humbleness of the research objective has little bearing on how we measure the success of a research task.
  • Success is measured by the answer to one simple question: Did the research meet its stated objectives with accuracy and integrity?

Basic Research, Applied Research, Action Research

• Research always has an objective.
• Approaches to classifying the types of objectives that guide research start with the answers to two basic questions:
  • Is the research being conducted for the sake of gaining knowledge, or are its results intended to have some practical purpose?
  • How broadly or narrowly can the results be applied?
• One way to answer these questions is to sort research activities into two very broad categories: basic research and applied research.

Basic Research

• Basic research is undertaken simply to further knowledge.
  • It is done for its own sake, so it is not often seen outside of academic settings.
• In its formal sense, basic (or theoretical) research often involves proposing, testing, and developing theories.
  • Its purpose is to provide principles that advance knowledge in a certain area of study.
• Theoretical researchers formulate and test models they believe may apply broadly to their disciplines.
• Example: The human brain is the current focus of much educational research.
  • Some researchers use an information-processing model of the human brain that compares the brain's functions to those of a computer.
  • This theoretical analogy has become a framework for other researchers to build on.
• The goal of most basic research is to come up with ideas, models, or paradigms that (with time and testing) come to be accepted as general truths or, perhaps more accurately, as generally valid ways of seeing the world.
• The major objective of basic research is to have its findings apply as widely and universally as possible.
• Theories generated by basic research provide helpful ways of framing problems and tasks, but they do little beyond this “thinking” stage.

Applied Research

• Applied research does not have abstract, generalizable theories as its goal; it has a context.
• Examples of applied research studies in education:
  • The effectiveness of learning coaches on student participation.
  • Identifying large numbers of struggling young readers in a school or district and using what it learns to appeal for special program funding.
  • A principal might hope to create faculty meetings that are more efficient and produce better decision making.
• If an applied research study proves effective, it might be applied in other similar contexts and become “general” in that way.
• Applied research means that we learn about, test, and evaluate something we would like to use or apply in a real setting.
• Most research conducted in schools is concerned with practical ways to improve learning, so it is usually applied research.

Action Research

• Action research falls toward the far right of the continuum for specificity: it is very specific.
• This kind of research—often undertaken by teachers right within their school—is a special category of applied research called action research.

Comparing Basic, Applied, and Action Research

Method and Methodology

• Research method or research plan refers to a carefully laid out series of steps for finding out what you want to know.
• Methods are shaped by the nature of the question identified for research.

Factors in Determining a Research Method

• Ethical concern for your research subjects.
  • Ensuring that your work does not cause harm to others.
  • All organizations that conduct research have ethics-review boards that examine research methods to ensure research subjects are protected from physical harm, psychological damage, or other negative effects.
• The availability of data.
  • Research tasks may be constricted in some ways by limits on data.
• Time, money, and other resources available for your study.
  • Most research projects work within a set budget and time period, so the ideal set-up may not always be feasible.
  • Feasibility can force you to be creative about your research plan.
• The amount of research that has already been done in the area.
  • Some research is easier to structure and conduct because a large body of work and literature already exists on the topic.
  • Where a wealth of work is absent, a researcher needs considerable personal expertise and resources to complete her research task.
• How you want to use your findings.
  • It is easy to collect data that do not truly answer the questions asked in your research.

Method Versus Methodology

• Research method refers to the series of steps you choose to find the answer to your question—it is like a "research lesson plan."
• Research methodology is more like an overarching guiding philosophy; it is your explanation of why you chose to approach the question as you did.
• A clear methodology is important because it reveals the fundamental beliefs that you, as a researcher, hold about the question you are investigating.
• To fully understand your research, your readers need to understand the perspective you bring to your work.
• Methodology is:
  • Philosophical: questions about what reality is (metaphysics) and how something can truly be known (epistemology).
  • Normative: inherent in methodology are assumptions both about how the world is organized and how it should be organized.
  • Paradigmatic: scientific inquiry is shaped by great, sweeping paradigms or metaphors about how the world works.

Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research

• Two basic research paradigms: quantitative and qualitative

Quantitative Research

• Comes from Western intellectual traditions.
• Empirical: it aims to "discover" through the senses experiences that can be measured.
• Deductive: a "big idea" or general theory (which is usually stated in a hypothesis) is tested by looking at whether individual facts support it.
• When we count up these data, we are aggregating them: individual cases or responses are not so important.
  • Instead, the data as a whole are analyzed for any significant patterns-this is where the statistical analysis comes in.
• Statistical analyses have generally found a correlation (a link) between low income and poor health.
• Quantitative research uses specific procedures, or recipes, to conduct systematic studies.

Qualitative Research

• Generally, qualitative research explores social or human problems.
• It tries to describe a phenomenon (quality), not count it (quantity).
• To complete qualitative research, a researcher must build a complex, holistic picture; analyze words; report detailed views of informants; and usually conduct the study in a natural setting.
• Inductive or emergent: the theory-or perhaps more accurately, the interpretation-emerges from the data.
• Open-ended inquiry: the researcher enters the scene with an "I wonder what I'll find out" approach.
• Qualitative research also makes use of sensory observations, but it can be more open to the felt or subjective experiences that empirical studies actually strive to eliminate or control by being as objective as possible.
• Context is what the study is about: the researcher wants to know how people behave, think, and feel in their own environments.
• The setting of the research is naturalistic, in that it “takes place in the real world…and the researcher does not attempt to manipulate the phenomenon of interest."
• Because qualitative research relates to specific contexts, it is less generalizable than quantitative research.
• However, qualitative researchers don't aim so much for generalizable conclusions: the individual case is more important than patterns that might emerge from aggregating and generalizing the data.

Comparing Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research

Which to Choose?

• Both major paradigms-quantitative and qualitative-have legitimate roles to play in research.
• The choice of one over the other depends on the research question to be answered.
• In some cases, we might use elements of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in a research plan.
• Many researchers take an eclectic approach to methodology, employing both quantitative and qualitative strategies where most useful.

Mixed Methods Approach

• Quantitative and qualitative research strategies can complement and support findings.
• Triangulation: approaching the same problem from different angles (in this case, different methodologies) improves the accuracy and validity of the research findings.

Examples:

• Observing preschoolers
  • A researcher observing preschoolers in a playgroup uses an observation checklist, counting certain behaviors that he observes, and jots down observations that he will later turn into rich descriptions of the playgroup setting.
  • The fact that he is also counting specifically defined behaviors leans more towards a quantitative approach.
• Recreational program satisfaction
  • A researcher is trying to evaluate the recreational programs at a high school. The main source of her data is a survey that asks students to identify which programs they have used, and to indicate on a scale of one to five how satisfied they were with each program. She also uses documents to review participation rates.
  • She also includes open-ended questions on her survey so participants can respond freely with their own ideas-a qualitative approach.

Types of Quantitative (Statistical) Studies

• Experimental: usually uses a treatment group and a control group to study the effects of an experimental intervention.
• Correlational: looks for associations between two phenomena.
  • An important thing to remember about correlations is that they show only a relationship between two variables, not the cause of that relationship.
• Causal-comparative: looks for the causal connection between two linked phenomena.

Types of Qualitative (Descriptive) Studies

• Case study: focuses with great detail on a particular person or group.
• Ethnographic: attempts to create rich portraits of everyday life.
• Hermeneutic: studies texts (defined broadly) to assess the significance of the texts for the people being studied.
• Historical: uses documents (or interviews) to study something that has occurred in the past.

About Bias: Situating the Researcher

• Another important distinction between quantitative and qualitative methodologies is the role of the researcher within the research.
• Quantitative research is highly structured because those who practice quantitative research depend on the careful application of specific procedures in an attempt to avoid human bias and therefore human error.
• The relationship between researcher and subjects is-at least as far as the research process is concerned-a nonrelationship because the researcher does not want her presence to influence or interfere with the subjects in any way.
• Avoiding researcher bias in carefully controlled laboratory conditions seems straightforward, but life conspires to become murkier when we start collecting field data.
• First, avoiding bias isn't really viewed as a problem in qualitative research. Instead, human biases are acknowledged as important perspectives that must be understood.
• Researchers are often chastised for imposing their own perspectives on what they study, and it is true that some research is simply too idiosyncratic to be useful.
• Responsible researchers do their best to be conscious of personal biases that shape their perceptions and their work.

Keep the Goal in Mind: Improving Students' Lives

• The true value of research is determined not by arguing which research approach is superior, but by returning to the question of whether a study furthers the objectives it sets out to achieve.
• A research method should serve the research objectives, not the other way around.
• Your research can draw on different theoretical perspectives and a combination of strategies, so long as it is conducted ethically, with your commitment to as best as you can-"tell the truth" about what you are studying.
• The goal is to further knowledge about what improvements can be made in the lives of students in schools.