Action Research and Educational Research

Action Research

Chapter 1 of Action Research: Teachers as Researchers in the Classroom, Second Edition, is an extremely informative chapter for teachers explaining how to conduct research in their classrooms.  The four steps that this author recommends are plan, act, develop, and reflect.  In the planning stage the teacher determines what their current situation or problem is.  The acting stage has the teacher implement an improvement.  The developing stage is a chance for the teacher to review the changes that have been made, while the final stage, reflecting, gives the teacher a chance to report out and give recommendations.  Each of these stages is a recursive and cyclical process whereby the teachers often repeat some or all of the same steps repeatedly until a desired outcome is achieved.  The key to action research is that it is an ongoing process that never seems to end.  Teachers are constantly presented with new students and curriculum which require new and different strategies from year to year.

Educational Research

There are five basic steps to conducting a literature review that the author of Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, Second Edition recommend.  Those five steps are to identify key terms, locate the literature, select the literature, organize the literature, and write the review.  Following these steps makes reviewing literature quite straightforward.  By narrowing your search to relevant terms, you can easily rule out those not-so-informative articles.  Running the search and selecting the literature requires a keen eye and the need to evaluate the results of your search.  Finally organizing the literature and writing the review is a good process to help you organize your thoughts and see what exactly you have.  Organizing the literature simply provides you with a visual representation of the research you have done.  For an example of this visual aid, check out the literature map for the Wikipedia.org entry I wrote below.  I made the literature map using gliffy.com.