Developing a question for action research

1. Developing the question

2. Action Research Questions normally consider
the researcher to be inside the research and
are more personal
Social Science question view the research from
the outside
The following examples demonstrate how to re-
frame the Social Science question so that it
becomes an Action Research one:

3. What is the relationship between teacher
motivation and teacher retention?
I’m going to change the way I timetable
staff and evaluate staff responses

4. 2. Does management style influence
teacher enthusiasm?
I’m going to try a bottom-up approach to
change management and evaluate
teacher responses

5. 3. Will a different seating arrangement
increase student participation?
I’m going to introduce several different
strategies in seating arrangements and
evaluate student participation in each
of them

6. Who will your collaborators be?
- students, clients, colleagues -

7. Classroom activities

8. Part A
Consider the question,
“Which of our pens is the best?”
and then in pairs discuss what you understand by this research question and
whether you see it as problematic. If you do find it problematic note down
why this is. What do you need to know/do to make it less problematic?
You are likely to have come to the conclusion that the above is not an
easy question to answer and primarily because you don’t know what is
meant by ‘the best’.
Reliability and Validity

9. Part B
Let us assume that some members of a group of people agreed on the following
features of pens which could be used as ‘criterial atributes’:
Cost of the pen; colour; ease of use; style; durability; maker’s name
Let’s say that the whole group were then asked to rank these and we achieved a
ranking outcome of importance as Result 1. Now two ‘methodological’ issues are
whether the data obtained is reliable (repeatable) and whether it is valid (are the
claims justified by the data). Using these definitions try and answer these
questions,
“Is the Result 1 data reliable?” cont.
 The Pen Exercise