Action Research Spring2008

Action Research

Action Research - Power Point by: Dr. Tarek Chebbi, FIU

Action Research in Education

http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/coss.html#arr

•is a practical way for individuals to explore the nature of their practice and to improve it. •encourages practitioners to become knowledge-makers, rather than merely knowledge-users.

(Dr. Tarek Chebbi, 2001)

• is a research that ANY of US can do on his/her own practice to improve it.

Action Research

• investigates everyday problems experienced by teachers’ (Elliott, 1981).

• carried out by individually or by group working collaboratively with one purpose. Cohen et al (2000)

Who are involved ?


Teacher/s

Students

School/ school programs & practices

School Manager

The HOW of

Research…

Identify the

PROBLEM…

What is your concern?Why are you concerned?What do you think you could do

about it?

Barrett and Whitehead (1985)

What kind of evidence could you collect to help you make some judgment about what is happening?

How would you collect such evidence?

How would you check that your judgment about what has happened is reasonable, fair and accurate?

Starting points might be of the following kinds:

• I want to get better at my science teaching…• I’m not sure why my students don’t engage in

discussion…• I have to implement the speaking and

listening guidelines, but I’m not sure what is the best way…

• How can we make staff meetings more

productive?….

Clarifying a General Idea and an Area of Focus

• Statement/Observation: Students do not seem to be engaged during teen theater productions–Questions: How can I

improve their engagement ?

• Statement. Observation: Students take a lot of time to learn problem solving in mathematics, but this process doesn’t appear to transfer to their acquisition of other mathematics skills and knowledge– Question: How can I improve the

integration and transfer of problem-solving skills in mathematics?



For Further Thought

1. What general ideas do you have for action research?2. What is your area of focus?3. Complete the following statement: “The purpose of

the study is to…”4. Conduct an initial search of the related literature

using ERIC on-line5. Conduct an action plan that includes an area-of-focus

statement, definitions, research questions, a description of the intervention, membership of the action research group, negotiations to be undertaken, a timeline, the necessary resources for the project, and data collection ideas

• In APA style, in-text citations are placed within sentences and paragraphs so that it is clear what information is being quoted or paraphrased and whose information is being cited.

Reference Citations in Text

• Examples:• Works by a single author• The last name of the author and the year

of publication are inserted in the text at the appropriate point.

from theory on bounded rationality

(Simon, 1945)


• If the name of the author or the date appear as part of the narrative, cite only missing information in parentheses.

Simon (1945) posited that


• Works by multiple authors• When a work has two authors, always

cite both names every time the reference occurs in the text. In parenthetical material join the names with an ampersand (&).

• as has been shown (Leiter & Maslach, 1998)


• In the narrative text, join the names with the word "and."

• as Leiter and Maslach (1998) demonstrated• When a work has three, four, or five

authors, cite all authors the first time the reference occurs.

• Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1991) found


Action Research Spring2008

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Transcript of Action Research Spring2008