Q.1 When can teachers conduct action research, how is it different from applied research and why is it needed?
Course: Critical Thinking and Reflective Practices
Course Code 8611
Topics
When can teachers conduct action research, How is it different from applied research and why is it needed.
- How many types of action research.
- Participatory and Practical
AIOU Solved Assignment |Semester: Autumn/Spring | B.Ed/Bachelors in Education /Masters in Education / PhD in Education | BEd / MEd / M Phil Education | ASSIGNMENT Course Code 8611| Course: Critical Thinking and Reflective Practices
Answer:
Action research is either research
initiated to solve an immediate problem or a reflective process of progressive
problem-solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a
"community of practice" to improve the way they address issues and
solve problems.
There are two types of action research:
·
Participatory
·
Practical
Denscombe (2010, p. 6) writes that an
action research strategy's purpose is to solve a particular problem and to
produce guidelines for best practice. Action research involves actively
participating in a change situation, often via an existing organization, whilst
simultaneously conducting research. Action research can also be undertaken by
larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, to improve their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the
environments within which they practice. As designers and stakeholders,
researchers work with others to propose a new course of action to help their
community improve its work practices.
Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT,
first coined the term "action research" in 1944. In his 1946 paper
"Action Research and Minority Problems" he described action research
as "a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms
of social action and research leading to social action" that uses "a
spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and
fact-finding about the result of the action". Action research is an
interactive inquiry process that balances problem-solving actions implemented
in a collaborative context with data-driven collaborative analysis or research
to understand underlying causes enabling future predictions about personal and
organizational change (Reason & Bradbury, 2001).
After six decades of action research
development, many methods have evolved that adjust the balance to focus more on
the actions taken or more on the 2 research that result from the reflective
understanding of the actions.
This tension exists between
1. those who are more driven either by the researcher's
agenda or by participants;
2. those who are motivated primarily by instrumental goal
attainment or by the aim of personal, organizational, or societal
transformation; and
3. 1st-, to 2nd-, to 3rd-person research, that is, my
research on my own action, aimed primarily at personal change; our research on
our group (family/team), aimed primarily at improving the group; and
'scholarly' research aimed primarily at theoretical generalization or
large-scale change.
Action research challenges
traditional social science by moving beyond reflective knowledge created by
outside experts sampling variables, to an active moment-to-moment theorizing,
data collecting, and inquiry occurring amid emergent structure.
"Knowledge is always gained through action and for action. From this
starting point, to question the validity of social knowledge is to question,
not how to develop a reflective science about action, but how to develop
genuinely well-informed action – how to conduct an action science". In
this sense, performing action research is the same as performing an experiment,
thus it is an empirical process.
Different from applied research and why is it needed:
Currently, there is considerable
interest in action research (AR) in the language teaching field. The December
1999 issue of The Language Teacher, for example, was devoted entirely to this
subject. Action research is now frequently promoted as a new way for teachers
to develop professionally and investigate their classroom practice. But,
despite the growth of new publications now discussing action research, would-be
teacher researchers are not always necessarily clear about what action research
is, or how it relates to other kinds of applied research in the second language
teaching field with which they may already be familiar.
Take, for example, the following
comment from a teacher with whom I recently worked on an action research
project (see Burns, My experience of doing action research is that it is
difficult to grasp or explain the concept until one is in the process of doing
it. It is in the doing that it starts to make sense and become clear. (Jane
Hamilton, personal communication) On the JALT Teacher Education SIG action
research listserv, Dale Griffey recently raised the issue of how AR relates to
other kinds of research that aim to have applications to second language
teaching and learning:
What is the difference between AR and
applied research? The answer has to be a characteristic that is not the case
for applied research. I don't think we can say that AR is done by teachers, and
that is its defining characteristic because applied research is also done by
teachers all the time. What are the characteristics that set AR aside and mark
it as different?
This question is useful and
challenging. In my experience, it is frequently asked by teachers
new to action research: How is action research different from other research?
Action research and applied research are in some ways similar and overlapping,
but there are also important differences between them. In this article I will
attempt to draw out some of these similarities and differences, and address, in
particular, the question of what characterizes action research. I'll focus on this
exploration by first considering two hypothetical examples of research that might
be carried out on the topic of classroom strategies to enhance oral
interaction.
Example 1
As part of the introduction of a new
syllabus, a researcher wishes to know whether the use of group work will
improve students' ability to speak English. The researcher first consults the
literature on this area of research and decides on the approach and methods to
be used. The researcher's hypothesis is that "Group work will increase the
development of both fluency and accuracy in oral tasks." The researcher
assigns one group of students in a school to an experimental group, where all
classroom tasks are conducted through group work for two months.
An equal number of students (the control
group) are taught using the same tasks through a whole-class, teacher-fronted
approach for the same period. To ensure that the students in the
experimental group are not at higher levels of language learning, to begin with,
the researcher first administers a test. She then assigns students to the
groups based on the test results. At the end of the two months, each of
the groups is given a further identical test to see whether the use of
group work has resulted in higher results for the experimental group. The
results show that the students assigned to group work have performed at a
higher level of fluency, but that their performance on some aspects
of grammatical accuracy is lower than the control group. The researcher
publishes the findings of the study in a journal.
Example 2
As part of the introduction of a new
syllabus, a researcher decides to move away from the use of whole-class
speaking activities in his classroom. He decides to introduce more group work
for certain tasks and to observe how the students react. He assigns students to
groups and keeps a journal noting down his observations over two
weeks. At the end of this period, he notes that some students are not
participating in group tasks and are increasingly reluctant to work in
groups. He decides that students are unused to this approach and need more
practice. He increases the use of group work and assigns students to the same
groups. He also asks the students to complete a survey on their responses to
group work. His own observation and journal entries, as well as the surveys, indicate that students are becoming even more reluctant to do group work.
The teacher discusses the problem with some
colleagues who suggest he try letting students choose their own groups. The
teacher tries this strategy over a further period of one week and notes that
students are less reluctant. He also observes that the groups do not remain
static, but appear to change according to the task. He decides to try a further
approach of giving students a choice of tasks. This approach works even better
and interaction among the students increases noticeably.
You may have already decided
(correctly) that the first is an example of applied research, while the second
reflects an action research approach. Both of these examples are, of course,
simplified and idealized, but they do perhaps serve to draw out some of the
essential similarities and differences between action research and applied
research.
5. The first thing to note is that
both approaches adopt a scientific perspective (Cohen and Manion, 1994) on the
issues they are investigating. In other words, they are both concerned with going beyond intuitions or assumptions and using a systematic approach to asking
questions, collecting data, analyzing the data, and drawing conclusions and
interpretations from the findings. However, there are differences in the
approach. The first study adopts an objective stance in which the researcher
attempts to control variables that may affect the findings and to identify
possible relationships between the treatment (group work) and the outcomes
(increases in fluency and accuracy). The action researcher is not interested in
establishing relationships of this type but instead wants to find the best
possible ways of setting up new classroom activities. This is a more subjective
perspective, concerned with exploring different ways of teaching and
deliberately changing conditions in the classroom.
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