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Action ResearchThe Action Research Process |
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Step 4 - Gathering and analyzing dataOnce you've identified your intervention strategy, you will need to think about what overt, observable behaviors you can measure to determine if your intervention has an impact. In the previous example, you might have selected sending home explicit parent instructions for assisting with homework as one of your strategies and phone calls home when students did not complete their homework as another strategy or intervention. Before you begin your intervention, you will need to gather baseline data. Knowing how your students responded or performed before the beginning of your study gives you a starting point for comparing study results. You need to know your student homework completion rate before you enact your strategy so you will know if there has been a change as a result of the intervention. The baseline and post-intervention data must be gathered in the same fashion for your study to be valid and reliable. Validity relates to the truthfulness of the data. It means that the data actually measure the specific phenomenon that you are claiming to study. Is what you are measuring or collecting data about a true representation of student achievement? Do the number of books checked out of the library really mean students are reading more? Does attendance at PTA meetings truly represent parent involvement? Reliability relates to your claim that the data you have collected is accurate. Your findings are less credible or reliable if the number of participants is small or the number of times data was collected is limited. Just because a group of teachers at one training session identified training as important to them does not mean that all teachers believe that-after all, this group had already made a statement about training just by being at the session! While both of these issues are less pertinent in Action Research than in other educational research forums, they should still be considered when you are developing your data collection strategy. Next you will need to decide on a timeline for implementing your strategy, to see if there is an observable change in behavior. You will also need to determine exactly what you will do so you can identify what you will measure and how you will measure it. In our example, a phone log of parent contacts adds data to the pre and post intervention homework completion rate. But if in the study you design you are going to implement a new teaching strategy to see if students are more attentive as a result, you will need to identify what you mean by attentive. Does "attentiveness" mean that they are quiet (but potentially) daydreaming, or that they are completing their classroom assignment. Whichever one (or more) of these indicators you chose, you must decide what overt behavior you will gather data on. I'd suggest classwork completion (that's an easy one) and one other behavior (probably "on task" behaviors). If you are going to gather information about whether students are on task, consider how you will gather that information. You might have a blank seating chart (it really doesn't matter who is on task for this study) and every 5 minutes (or 3 minutes) I'd make a "sweep" of my classroom and note what everyone was doing at that specific point. Then 5 minutes (or 3 minutes) later I'd do another sweep. If you are lucky enough to have a colleague or team leader who would gather the data for you, then you can take advantage of their completing the seating chart by marking who is off task and they can note exactly what you are doing at that point. (You might then find out that x% of your students are doing y when you are giving directions, for example.) You might decide that instead of doing a pre/post intervention activity, you will try a new strategy with first period and keep the other classes using the traditional strategy. In this case, you'd be comparing data between your two classes, not within the same class. For example, if you want to know if doing an advance organizer prior to introducing a unit and then to support your daily motivation, increases student achievement, then you can implement the intervention with first period and gather the homework/quiz/test scores of first period and one other of your classes. (Hopefully one with similar demographics.)
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