ACTION RESEARCH
Cherrylyn P. Mallari
According to the Glossary of Education Reform, Action research refers to a wide variety of evaluative, investigative, and analytical research methods designed to diagnose problems or weaknesses—whether organizational, academic, or instructional—and help educators develop practical solutions to address them quickly and efficiently. Action research may also be applied to programs or educational techniques that are not necessarily experiencing any problems, but that educators simply want to learn more about and improve. The general goal is to create a simple, practical, repeatable process of iterative learning, evaluation, and improvement that leads to increasingly better results for schools, teachers, or programs.
Kurt Lewin is generally considered the founding father of action research. He was a social psychologist and the first one to use the term action research in his paper “Action research and minority problems” written in 1946 (Kemmis, 2007). Action research happens when people are involved in researching their own practice in order to improve it and to come to a better understanding of their practice situations. It is action because they act within the systems that they are trying to improve and understand. It is research because it is systematic, critical inquiry made public (Altrichter, 2008).
Classroom Action Research is a technique of discovering out what works best in your own classroom so that you can enrich student learning. To maximize student learning, a teacher must find out what thrives best in a particular situation. There are many ways to improve knowledge about teaching. Many teachers practice personal reflection on teaching; that is, they look back at what has worked and has not worked in the classroom and think about how they can change their teaching strategies to enhance learning. A few teachers conduct formal empirical studies on teaching and learning, adding to their knowledge base. Classroom action research is more systematic and data-based than personal reflection. In CAR, a teacher focuses attention on a problem or question about his or her own classroom. For example, does role-playing help students understand course concepts more completely than lecture methods? Which concepts are most confusing to students? Because you are researching the impact of your own teaching, you automatically take into account your own teaching strengths and weaknesses, the typical skill level of your students. Your findings have immediate practical significance in terms of teaching decisions.
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The author is Teacher I at San Antonio Elementary School, Guagua West
District