research questions for action research in education

21 Action Research Examples (In Education)

Action research is an example of qualitative research . It refers to a wide range of evaluative or investigative methods designed to analyze professional practices and take action for improvement.

Commonly used in education, those practices could be related to instructional methods, classroom practices, or school organizational matters.

The creation of action research is attributed to Kurt Lewin , a German-American psychologist also considered to be the father of social psychology.

Gillis and Jackson (2002) offer a very concise definition of action research: “systematic collection and analysis of data for the purpose of taking action and making change” (p.264).

The methods of action research in education include:

• conducting in-class observations
• taking field notes
• surveying or interviewing teachers, administrators, or parents
• using audio and video recordings.

The goal is to identify problematic issues, test possible solutions, or simply carry-out continuous improvement.

There are several steps in action research : identify a problem, design a plan to resolve, implement the plan, evaluate effectiveness, reflect on results, make necessary adjustment and repeat the process.

Action Research Examples

• Digital literacy assessment and training: The school’s IT department conducts a survey on students’ digital literacy skills. Based on the results, a tailored training program is designed for different age groups.
• Library resources utilization study: The school librarian tracks the frequency and type of books checked out by students. The data is then used to curate a more relevant collection and organize reading programs.
• Extracurricular activities and student well-being: A team of teachers and counselors assess the impact of extracurricular activities on student mental health through surveys and interviews. Adjustments are made based on findings.
• Parent-teacher communication channels: The school evaluates the effectiveness of current communication tools (e.g., newsletters, apps) between teachers and parents. Feedback is used to implement a more streamlined system.
• Homework load evaluation: Teachers across grade levels assess the amount and effectiveness of homework given. Adjustments are made to ensure a balance between academic rigor and student well-being.
• Classroom environment and learning: A group of teachers collaborates to study the impact of classroom layouts and decorations on student engagement and comprehension. Changes are made based on the findings.
• Student feedback on curriculum content: High school students are surveyed about the relevance and applicability of their current curriculum. The feedback is then used to make necessary curriculum adjustments.
• Teacher mentoring and support: New teachers are paired with experienced mentors. Both parties provide feedback on the effectiveness of the mentoring program, leading to continuous improvements.
• Assessment of school transportation: The school board evaluates the efficiency and safety of school buses through surveys with students and parents. Necessary changes are implemented based on the results.
• Cultural sensitivity training: After conducting a survey on students’ cultural backgrounds and experiences, the school organizes workshops for teachers to promote a more inclusive classroom environment.
• Environmental initiatives and student involvement: The school’s eco-club assesses the school’s carbon footprint and waste management. They then collaborate with the administration to implement greener practices and raise environmental awareness.
• Working with parents through research: A school’s admin staff conduct focus group sessions with parents to identify top concerns.Those concerns will then be addressed and another session conducted at the end of the school year.
• Peer teaching observations and improvements: Kindergarten teachers observe other teachers handling class transition techniques to share best practices.
• PTA surveys and resultant action: The PTA of a district conducts a survey of members regarding their satisfaction with remote learning classes.The results will be presented to the school board for further action.
• Recording and reflecting: A school administrator takes video recordings of playground behavior and then plays them for the teachers. The teachers work together to formulate a list of 10 playground safety guidelines.
• Pre/post testing of interventions: A school board conducts a district wide evaluation of a STEM program by conducting a pre/post-test of students’ skills in computer programming.
• Focus groups of practitioners : The professional development needs of teachers are determined from structured focus group sessions with teachers and admin.
• School lunch research and intervention: A nutrition expert is hired to evaluate and improve the quality of school lunches.
• School nurse systematic checklist and improvements: The school nurse implements a bathroom cleaning checklist to monitor cleanliness after the results of a recent teacher survey revealed several issues.
• Wearable technologies for pedagogical improvements; Students wear accelerometers attached to their hips to gain a baseline measure of physical activity.The results will identify if any issues exist.
• School counselor reflective practice : The school counselor conducts a student survey on antisocial behavior and then plans a series of workshops for both teachers and parents.

Detailed Examples

1. cooperation and leadership.

A science teacher has noticed that her 9 th grade students do not cooperate with each other when doing group projects. There is a lot of arguing and battles over whose ideas will be followed.

So, she decides to implement a simple action research project on the matter. First, she conducts a structured observation of the students’ behavior during meetings. She also has the students respond to a short questionnaire regarding their notions of leadership.

She then designs a two-week course on group dynamics and leadership styles. The course involves learning about leadership concepts and practices . In another element of the short course, students randomly select a leadership style and then engage in a role-play with other students.

At the end of the two weeks, she has the students work on a group project and conducts the same structured observation as before. She also gives the students a slightly different questionnaire on leadership as it relates to the group.

She plans to analyze the results and present the findings at a teachers’ meeting at the end of the term.

2. Professional Development Needs

Two high-school teachers have been selected to participate in a 1-year project in a third-world country. The project goal is to improve the classroom effectiveness of local teachers. 

The two teachers arrive in the country and begin to plan their action research. First, they decide to conduct a survey of teachers in the nearby communities of the school they are assigned to.

The survey will assess their professional development needs by directly asking the teachers and administrators. After collecting the surveys, they analyze the results by grouping the teachers based on subject matter.

They discover that history and social science teachers would like professional development on integrating smartboards into classroom instruction. Math teachers would like to attend workshops on project-based learning, while chemistry teachers feel that they need equipment more than training.

The two teachers then get started on finding the necessary training experts for the workshops and applying for equipment grants for the science teachers.

3. Playground Accidents

The school nurse has noticed a lot of students coming in after having mild accidents on the playground. She’s not sure if this is just her perception or if there really is an unusual increase this year.  So, she starts pulling data from the records over the last two years. She chooses the months carefully and only selects data from the first three months of each school year.

She creates a chart to make the data more easily understood. Sure enough, there seems to have been a dramatic increase in accidents this year compared to the same period of time from the previous two years.

She shows the data to the principal and teachers at the next meeting. They all agree that a field observation of the playground is needed.

Those observations reveal that the kids are not having accidents on the playground equipment as originally suspected. It turns out that the kids are tripping on the new sod that was installed over the summer.

They examine the sod and observe small gaps between the slabs. Each gap is approximately 1.5 inches wide and nearly two inches deep. The kids are tripping on this gap as they run.

They then discuss possible solutions.

4. Differentiated Learning

Trying to use the same content, methods, and processes for all students is a recipe for failure. This is why modifying each lesson to be flexible is highly recommended. Differentiated learning allows the teacher to adjust their teaching strategy based on all the different personalities and learning styles they see in their classroom.

Of course, differentiated learning should undergo the same rigorous assessment that all teaching techniques go through. So, a third-grade social science teacher asks his students to take a simple quiz on the industrial revolution. Then, he applies differentiated learning to the lesson.

By creating several different learning stations in his classroom, he gives his students a chance to learn about the industrial revolution in a way that captures their interests. The different stations contain: short videos, fact cards, PowerPoints, mini-chapters, and role-plays.

At the end of the lesson, students get to choose how they demonstrate their knowledge. They can take a test, construct a PPT, give an oral presentation, or conduct a simulated TV interview with different characters.

During this last phase of the lesson, the teacher is able to assess if they demonstrate the necessary knowledge and have achieved the defined learning outcomes. This analysis will allow him to make further adjustments to future lessons.

5. Healthy Habits Program

While looking at obesity rates of students, the school board of a large city is shocked by the dramatic increase in the weight of their students over the last five years. After consulting with three companies that specialize in student physical health, they offer the companies an opportunity to prove their value.

So, the board randomly assigns each company to a group of schools. Starting in the next academic year, each company will implement their healthy habits program in 5 middle schools.

Preliminary data is collected at each school at the beginning of the school year. Each and every student is weighed, their resting heart rate, blood pressure and cholesterol are also measured.

After analyzing the data, it is found that the schools assigned to each of the three companies are relatively similar on all of these measures.

At the end of the year, data for students at each school will be collected again. A simple comparison of pre- and post-program measurements will be conducted. The company with the best outcomes will be selected to implement their program city-wide.

Action research is a great way to collect data on a specific issue, implement a change, and then evaluate the effects of that change. It is perhaps the most practical of all types of primary research .

Most likely, the results will be mixed. Some aspects of the change were effective, while other elements were not. That’s okay. This just means that additional modifications to the change plan need to be made, which is usually quite easy to do.

There are many methods that can be utilized, such as surveys, field observations , and program evaluations.

The beauty of action research is based in its utility and flexibility. Just about anyone in a school setting is capable of conducting action research and the information can be incredibly useful.

Aronson, E., & Patnoe, S. (1997). The jigsaw classroom: Building cooperation in the classroom (2nd ed.). New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Gillis, A., & Jackson, W. (2002). Research Methods for Nurses: Methods and Interpretation . Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company.

Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of SocialIssues, 2 (4), 34-46.

Macdonald, C. (2012). Understanding participatory action research: A qualitative research methodology option. Canadian Journal of Action Research, 13 , 34-50. https://doi.org/10.33524/cjar.v13i2.37 Mertler, C. A. (2008). Action Research: Teachers as Researchers in the Classroom . London: Sage.

Dave Cornell (PhD)

Dr. Cornell has worked in education for more than 20 years. His work has involved designing teacher certification for Trinity College in London and in-service training for state governments in the United States. He has trained kindergarten teachers in 8 countries and helped businessmen and women open baby centers and kindergartens in 3 countries.

• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 25 Positive Punishment Examples
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• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ 15 Zone of Proximal Development Examples
• Dave Cornell (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/dave-cornell-phd/ Perception Checking: 15 Examples and Definition

Chris Drew (PhD)

This article was peer-reviewed and edited by Chris Drew (PhD). The review process on Helpful Professor involves having a PhD level expert fact check, edit, and contribute to articles. Reviewers ensure all content reflects expert academic consensus and is backed up with reference to academic studies. Dr. Drew has published over 20 academic articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education and holds a PhD in Education from ACU.

• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Positive Punishment Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 25 Dissociation Examples (Psychology)
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link 15 Zone of Proximal Development Examples
• Chris Drew (PhD) #molongui-disabled-link Perception Checking: 15 Examples and Definition

2 thoughts on “21 Action Research Examples (In Education)”

Where can I capture this article in a better user-friendly format, since I would like to provide it to my students in a Qualitative Methods course at the University of Prince Edward Island? It is a good article, however, it is visually disjointed in its current format. Thanks, Dr. Frank T. Lavandier

Hi Dr. Lavandier,

I’ve emailed you a word doc copy that you can use and edit with your class.

Best, Chris.

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225+ Action Research Topics In Education (Updated 2023)

Action research in education offers a powerful tool for educators to actively engage in improving their teaching practices and student outcomes. By combining research and action, this approach encourages teachers to become reflective practitioners and agents of change within their classrooms and schools. Action research topics in education encompass a wide range of issues that educators can investigate to address specific challenges and enhance their instructional strategies.

From examining the impact of technology integration to exploring innovative assessment methods, action research empowers teachers to develop evidence-based solutions tailored to their unique educational contexts. By conducting small-scale studies, educators can gather data, analyze it, and implement targeted interventions to make tangible improvements in student learning.

In this blog, we will delve into a variety of action research topics in education, exploring how they can empower educators to drive meaningful change and foster a dynamic and effective learning environment for their students.

Table of Contents

Format of action research paper in education

Please note that this table provides a general outline and can be customized based on the specific requirements and guidelines of your research paper.

What to consider while selecting action research topics in education

When selecting action research topics in education, it is important to consider several factors to ensure that your research is meaningful, relevant, and feasible. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind:

Personal Interest

Choose action research topics in education that genuinely interests you. When you are passionate about the subject matter, you will be more motivated and engaged throughout the research process.

Educational Context

Consider the specific educational context in which you work or are interested in. Reflect on the challenges, needs, or areas of improvement within that context. Your research should address a problem or issue that is relevant and impactful within the educational setting.

Research Gap

Review existing literature and research in your chosen area to identify any gaps or unanswered questions. Select action research topics in education that contributes to the existing knowledge base and fills a research gap.

Feasibility

Evaluate the feasibility of conducting the research within the available resources, time frame, and constraints. Consider factors such as access to participants, data collection methods, ethical considerations, and potential support from colleagues or institutions.

Relevance and Impact

Choose action research topics in education that have practical implications and can lead to positive changes in teaching practices, student learning, or educational policies. Aim for research that can make a difference in the educational field.

Collaboration Opportunities

Consider if there are opportunities for collaboration with colleagues, researchers, or educational organizations. Collaborative research can provide additional support, expertise, and diverse perspectives.

Ethical Considerations

Ensure that your research topic aligns with ethical guidelines and regulations. Consider the potential impact on participants and ensure their rights, privacy, and confidentiality are protected.

Remember, selecting an action research topic is an important decision, so take the time to thoroughly evaluate and choose a topic that aligns with your goals and the needs of the educational community you serve.

200+ Action research topics in education

• The impact of technology integration on student engagement in the classroom.
• Strategies to improve reading comprehension in elementary school students.
• Enhancing parental involvement in student learning and academic success.
• Investigating the effectiveness of cooperative learning strategies in promoting peer interaction and collaboration.
• Addressing the achievement gap in mathematics between different student groups.
• Examining the impact of inclusive education on the academic and social development of students with disabilities.
• Enhancing critical thinking skills through project-based learning.
• Implementing differentiated instruction to meet the diverse needs of students in the classroom.
• Investigating the effects of homework on student learning and academic performance.
• Promoting positive classroom behavior and reducing disruptive behaviors.
• Assessing the effectiveness of teacher feedback in improving student writing skills.
• Strategies to promote a growth mindset and enhance student motivation.
• Examining the impact of physical activity on student concentration and academic performance.
• Enhancing teacher-student relationships and its impact on student engagement and achievement.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student creativity and academic achievement.
• Strategies to support English language learners in mainstream classrooms.
• Examining the impact of peer tutoring on student learning and academic achievement.
• Enhancing teacher collaboration and its impact on instructional practices and student outcomes.
• Investigating the effectiveness of inquiry-based science instruction in promoting student understanding.
• Promoting gender equity in STEM education.
• Examining the impact of mindfulness practices on student well-being and academic success.
• Strategies for reducing test anxiety and promoting test-taking skills.
• Investigating the effects of the classroom environment on student learning and engagement.
• Enhancing student self-regulation skills through metacognitive strategies.
• Promoting multicultural education and inclusivity in the classroom.
• Examining the impact of flipped classroom models on student learning outcomes.
• Strategies for integrating technology effectively in early childhood education.
• Investigating the effects of outdoor education on student engagement and academic achievement.
• Enhancing teacher professional development programs to improve instructional practices.
• Promoting environmental education and sustainable practices in schools.
• Examining the impact of social-emotional learning programs on student behavior and well-being.
• Strategies for supporting students with ADHD in the classroom.
• Investigating the effects of classroom management strategies on student behavior and academic performance.
• Enhancing parental involvement in early childhood education settings.
• Promoting digital literacy skills among students.
• Examining the impact of peer assessment on student learning and achievement.
• Strategies for fostering creativity and innovation in the classroom.
• Investigating the effects of inclusive literature on promoting empathy and cultural understanding.
• Enhancing the use of formative assessment in the classroom.
• Promoting critical media literacy skills among students.
• Examining the impact of outdoor learning on student engagement and academic achievement.
• Strategies for promoting positive social skills and reducing bullying in schools.
• Investigating the effects of flexible seating arrangements on student behavior and learning outcomes.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology in special education settings.
• Promoting student self-efficacy and academic motivation.
• Examining the impact of project-based learning on student problem-solving skills.
• Strategies for promoting positive school climate and student well-being.
• Investigating the effects of parental involvement on student homework completion and academic performance.
• Enhancing teacher feedback practices to improve student learning and achievement.
• Promoting inclusive practices for students with diverse cultural backgrounds.
• Examining the impact of arts education on student creativity and academic success.
• Strategies for supporting students with learning disabilities
• Investigating the effects of gamification on student motivation and engagement.
• Enhancing collaborative learning in online education settings.
• Promoting effective study habits and time management skills among students.
• Examining the impact of parental involvement on early literacy skills development.
• Strategies for promoting positive teacher-student relationships in high school settings.
• Investigating the effects of mindfulness practices on reducing stress and anxiety in students.
• Enhancing student self-esteem and self-confidence through targeted interventions.
• Promoting gender equality in science education.
• Examining the impact of teacher-led professional learning communities on instructional practices and student outcomes.
• Strategies for supporting students with autism spectrum disorder in inclusive classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of project-based learning on student problem-solving skills in mathematics.
• Enhancing cultural competency among educators to meet the needs of diverse student populations.
• Promoting digital citizenship and online safety education.
• Examining the impact of restorative justice practices on reducing disciplinary incidents and promoting a positive school climate.
• Strategies for integrating social justice education across the curriculum.
• Investigating the effects of parental involvement on student transitions from elementary to middle school.
• Enhancing teacher collaboration for effective interdisciplinary instruction.
• Promoting global citizenship and cross-cultural understanding in the classroom.
• Examining the impact of music education on student cognitive development and academic performance.
• Strategies for supporting students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in mainstream classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of cooperative learning strategies on improving students’ social skills.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with visual impairments.
• Promoting inclusive practices for students with diverse learning needs.
• Examining the impact of teacher-led professional development on instructional practices and student outcomes.
• Strategies for promoting positive classroom behavior in early childhood settings.
• Investigating the effects of growth mindset interventions on student resilience and academic achievement.
• Enhancing parent-teacher communication for improved student support and academic success.
• Promoting environmental sustainability education in primary schools.
• Examining the impact of outdoor play on children’s physical and cognitive development.
• Strategies for supporting students with English language learning difficulties.
• Investigating the effects of mindfulness practices on reducing test anxiety in students.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with learning disabilities.
• Promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills in mathematics education.
• Examining the impact of peer mentoring programs on student academic and social-emotional development.
• Strategies for creating inclusive classrooms for students with hearing impairments.
• Investigating the effects of student-led conferences on student ownership of learning.
• Enhancing the use of formative assessment for personalized instruction.
• Promoting positive classroom discourse and student participation.
• Examining the impact of outdoor experiential learning on student environmental awareness and action.
• Strategies for supporting students with emotional and behavioral disorders in inclusive settings.
• Investigating the effects of teacher self-reflection on instructional practices and student outcomes.
• Enhancing the use of assistive technology for students with physical disabilities.
• Promoting media literacy education to develop critical media consumers.
• Examining the impact of service-learning on student civic engagement and social responsibility.
• Strategies for creating inclusive classrooms for students with specific learning disabilities.
• Investigating the effects of inquiry-based science instruction on student scientific inquiry skills.
• Enhancing teacher-parent partnerships for collaborative support of student learning.
• Promoting cultural diversity education in secondary schools.
• Examining the impact of cooperative learning on student academic achievement in science education.
• Strategies for promoting inclusive practices for students with speech and language disorders.
• Investigating the effects of flipped classroom models on student engagement and learning outcomes in social studies.
• Enhancing teacher feedback practices to improve student writing skills in English language arts.
• Promoting social-emotional learning through mindfulness-based interventions in elementary schools.
• Examining the impact of project-based learning on student creativity and problem-solving skills in the arts.
• Strategies for supporting students with executive functioning difficulties in the classroom.
• Investigating the effects of differentiated instruction on student motivation and academic achievement in mathematics.
• Enhancing parental involvement in supporting early literacy development at home.
• Promoting inclusive practices for students with physical disabilities in physical education classes.
• Examining the impact of teacher-student relationships on student attendance and classroom behavior.
• Strategies for promoting positive peer relationships and reducing social isolation in middle school.
• Investigating the effects of drama-based pedagogy on student engagement and understanding in literature studies.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with learning difficulties in computer science education.
• Promoting character education and ethical decision-making in schools.
• Examining the impact of teacher self-efficacy on instructional practices and student outcomes.
• Strategies for supporting students with English language learning difficulties in content area classes.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student motivation and academic achievement in history education.
• Enhancing family-school partnerships for students with special educational needs.
• Promoting critical digital literacy skills for responsible online information consumption.
• Examining the impact of inclusive physical education on student attitudes towards fitness and physical activity.
• Strategies for supporting students with dyslexia in reading instruction.
• Investigating the effects of outdoor education on student environmental attitudes and behaviors.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with autism spectrum disorder.
• Promoting career readiness and employability skills in high school education.
• Examining the impact of parent-led reading interventions on early literacy skills in kindergarten.
• Strategies for promoting positive teacher-student relationships in online learning environments.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student creativity and academic achievement in science education.
• Enhancing teacher collaboration for effective co-teaching in inclusive classrooms.
• Promoting global perspectives and intercultural understanding in social studies education.
• Examining the impact of cooperative learning on student social skills and peer relationships.
• Strategies for supporting students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in physical education classes.
• Investigating the effects of project-based learning on student problem-solving skills in computer science.
• Enhancing cultural competence among educators for working with diverse student populations.
• Promoting digital citizenship and online safety in digital media literacy education.
• Examining the impact of restorative practices on reducing disciplinary incidents and fostering a positive school climate.
• Strategies for supporting students with emotional and behavioral challenges in mainstream classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of growth mindset interventions on student academic resilience in mathematics education.
• Enhancing parent-teacher communication for effective student support and academic success.
• Promoting environmental sustainability education in secondary schools.
• Examining the impact of outdoor experiential learning on student STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) interest and career aspirations.
• Strategies for creating inclusive classrooms for students with visual impairments.
• Investigating the effects of student-led conferences on student self-evaluation and goal setting.
• Enhancing the use of formative assessment for personalized instruction in physical education.
• Promoting positive classroom management strategies.
• Examining the impact of cooperative learning on student academic achievement in foreign language education.
• Strategies for promoting inclusive practices for students with autism spectrum disorder in inclusive classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of blended learning models on student engagement and learning outcomes in mathematics.
• Enhancing teacher feedback practices to improve student oral communication skills in language arts.
• Promoting social-emotional learning through mindfulness-based interventions in high schools.
• Examining the impact of project-based learning on student creativity and problem-solving skills in technology education.
• Strategies for supporting students with learning difficulties in inclusive science classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of differentiated instruction on student motivation and academic achievement in social studies.
• Enhancing parental involvement in supporting numeracy development at home.
• Promoting inclusive practices for students with sensory impairments in inclusive classrooms.
• Examining the impact of teacher-student relationships on student motivation and academic achievement in physical education.
• Strategies for promoting positive peer relationships and reducing bullying in high schools.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student motivation and academic achievement in mathematics education.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with learning difficulties in science education.
• Promoting character education and ethical decision-making in elementary schools.
• Examining the impact of teacher self-efficacy on instructional practices and student outcomes in music education.
• Strategies for supporting students with English language learning difficulties in mathematics classes.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student creativity and academic achievement in social-emotional learning.
• Enhancing family-school partnerships for students with special educational needs in inclusive settings.
• Promoting critical digital literacy skills for responsible online communication in language arts education.
• Examining the impact of inclusive physical education on student attitudes towards physical fitness and well-being.
• Strategies for supporting students with dyscalculia in mathematics instruction.
• Investigating the effects of outdoor education on student environmental knowledge and sustainability practices.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with hearing impairments in inclusive classrooms.
• Promoting career exploration and development in middle school education.
• Examining the impact of parent-led science experiments on student interest and learning outcomes in science education.
• Strategies for promoting positive teacher-student relationships in virtual learning environments.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student creativity and academic achievement in language arts.
• Enhancing teacher collaboration for effective co-planning and instructional delivery in inclusive classrooms.
• Promoting global citizenship and cultural competence in foreign language education.
• Examining the impact of cooperative learning on student social-emotional development and well-being.
• Strategies for supporting students with physical disabilities in adaptive physical education classes.
• Investigating the effects of project-based learning on student problem-solving skills in engineering education.
• Enhancing cultural competence among educators for working with diverse student populations in social studies.
• Promoting digital literacy skills for responsible online research and information evaluation.
• Examining the impact of restorative practices on reducing conflicts and promoting positive relationships in middle schools.
• Strategies for supporting students with emotional and behavioral challenges in inclusive classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of growth mindset interventions on student academic resilience in language arts.
• Enhancing parent-teacher communication for effective collaboration and student support in mathematics education.
• Promoting environmental sustainability education in primary schools through cross-curricular integration.
• Examining the impact of outdoor experiential learning on student ecological literacy and environmental stewardship.
• Strategies for creating inclusive classrooms for students with cognitive impairments.
• Investigating the effects of student-led conferences on student self-reflection and goal-setting in science education.
• Enhancing the use of formative assessment for personalized instruction in social studies.
• Promoting positive classroom management strategies for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
• Examining the impact of cooperative learning on student academic achievement in physical sciences.
• Strategies for promoting inclusive practices for students with speech and language difficulties in inclusive classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of blended learning models on student engagement and learning outcomes in language arts.
• Enhancing teacher feedback practices to improve student presentation skills in communication studies.
• Promoting social-emotional learning through mindfulness-based interventions in middle schools.
• Examining the impact of project-based learning on student creativity and problem-solving skills in fine arts.
• Strategies for supporting students with learning difficulties in inclusive social-emotional learning programs.
• Investigating the effects of differentiated instruction on student motivation and academic achievement in physical education.
• Enhancing parental involvement in supporting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education at home.
• Promoting inclusive practices for students with intellectual disabilities in inclusive classrooms.
• Examining the impact of teacher-student relationships on student motivation and academic achievement in music education.
• Strategies for promoting positive peer relationships and fostering social-emotional development in high schools.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student motivation and academic achievement in physical sciences.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with learning difficulties in social studies education.
• Promoting character education and ethical decision-making in secondary schools.
• Examining the impact of teacher self-efficacy on instructional practices and student outcomes in physical education.
• Strategies for supporting students with English language learning difficulties in science classes.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student creativity and academic achievement in physical education.
• Enhancing family-school partnerships for students with special educational needs in inclusive physical education settings.
• Promoting critical digital literacy skills for responsible online communication in social studies education.
• Strategies for supporting students with dysgraphia in writing instruction.
• Investigating the effects of outdoor education on student environmental knowledge and sustainable practices in science education.
• Enhancing the use of educational technology for students with visual impairments in inclusive classrooms.
• Promoting career exploration and development in high school education.
• Examining the impact of parent-led math activities on student interest and learning outcomes in mathematics education.
• Investigating the effects of arts integration on student creativity and academic achievement in social sciences.
• Enhancing teacher collaboration for effective co-planning and instructional delivery in inclusive physical education settings.
• Promoting global citizenship and cultural competence in history education.
• Examining the impact of cooperative learning on student social-emotional development and well-being in language arts.
• Strategies for supporting students with physical disabilities in inclusive arts education classes.
• Investigating the effects of project-based learning on student problem-solving skills in computer programming education.
• Enhancing cultural competence among educators for working with diverse student populations in mathematics education.
• Promoting digital literacy skills for responsible online communication and information sharing.
• Examining the impact of restorative practices on reducing conflicts and promoting positive relationships in high schools.
• Strategies for supporting students with emotional and behavioral challenges in inclusive language arts classrooms.
• Investigating the effects of growth mindset interventions on student academic resilience in social sciences.
• Enhancing parent-teacher communication for effective collaboration and student support in science education.
• Promoting environmental sustainability education in elementary schools through interdisciplinary integration.

Tips to write appealing action research paper in education

Here are some tips to write an appealing action research paper in education:

• Select a Relevant and Engaging Topic: Choose action research topics in education that is relevant to the field of education and aligns with your interests and goals. Select a topic that has practical implications and can contribute to improving educational practices.
• Clearly Define the Problem: Clearly define the problem or issue you want to address through your action research. Provide a concise and focused problem statement that highlights the specific area you aim to investigate.
• Set Clear Objectives: State clear and measurable objectives for your research. Identify what you want to achieve through your study and how you plan to measure your outcomes.
• Conduct a Literature Review: Conduct a thorough review of existing literature related to your research topic. Identify gaps in current knowledge and highlight how your research will contribute to filling those gaps.
• Use a Rigorous Research Design: Choose an appropriate research design that aligns with your research objectives. Consider whether a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approach is most suitable for your study.
• Collect and Analyze Data: Collect relevant data through appropriate methods, such as surveys, interviews, observations, or document analysis. Use rigorous data analysis techniques to derive meaningful findings from your data.
• Reflect and Take Action: Reflect on your findings and consider their implications for educational practice. Based on your findings, develop actionable recommendations or interventions that can be implemented to address the identified problem.
• Write Clearly and Concisely: Present your research in a clear and concise manner. Use appropriate academic language and structure your paper logically. Clearly explain your methodology, findings, and conclusions.
• Support Findings with Evidence: Use evidence from your data analysis to support your findings and conclusions. Use graphs, charts, or quotes from participants to enhance the credibility of your research.
• Discuss Limitations and Future Directions: Acknowledge the limitations of your study and discuss areas for future research. Address any potential biases or challenges that may have influenced your findings.
• Consider the Audience: Keep in mind the intended audience for your research paper, which may include educators, researchers, or policymakers. Write in a way that engages and appeals to your target audience.
• Revise and Edit: Proofread your paper for any grammatical or spelling errors. Revise your content to ensure clarity and coherence. Seek feedback from peers or mentors to improve the quality of your paper.

Remember, an appealing action research paper in education is one that not only presents valuable findings but also offers practical insights and recommendations for improving educational practices.

In conclusion, action research topics in education provide a powerful framework for addressing real-world issues and improving teaching and learning practices. This research approach empowers educators to take an active role in identifying challenges, implementing interventions, and evaluating their impact within their own classrooms or educational settings. 

By engaging in systematic inquiry, educators can generate valuable insights, evidence-based strategies, and meaningful changes that positively influence student outcomes. Action research promotes a reflective and collaborative approach, encouraging teachers to continuously refine their instructional methods, adapt to diverse student needs, and create inclusive learning environments. 

Ultimately, action research in education empowers educators to be agents of change, fostering innovation and improvement in education while enhancing student engagement, achievement, and well-being.

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200+ List of Topics for Action Research in the Classroom

In the dynamic landscape of education, teachers are continually seeking innovative ways to enhance their teaching practices and improve student outcomes. Action research in the classroom is a powerful tool that allows educators to investigate and address specific challenges, leading to positive changes in teaching methods and learning experiences. 

Selecting the right topics from the list of topics for action research in the classroom is crucial for ensuring meaningful insights and improvements. In this blog post, we will explore the significance of action research in the classroom, the criteria for selecting impactful topics, and provide an extensive list of potential research areas.

Understanding: What is Action Research

Table of Contents

Action research is a reflective process that empowers teachers to systematically investigate and analyze their own teaching practices. Unlike traditional research, action research is conducted by educators within their own classrooms, emphasizing a collaborative and participatory approach. 

This method enables teachers to identify challenges, implement interventions, and assess the effectiveness of their actions.

How to Select Topics From List of Topics for Action Research in the Classroom

Choosing the right topic is the first step in the action research process. The selected topic should align with classroom goals, address students’ needs, be feasible to implement, and have the potential for positive impact. Teachers should consider the following criteria when selecting action research topics:

• Alignment with Classroom Goals and Objectives: The chosen topic should directly contribute to the overall goals and objectives of the classroom. Whether it’s improving student engagement, enhancing learning outcomes, or fostering a positive classroom environment, the topic should align with the broader educational context.
• Relevance to Students’ Needs and Challenges: Effective action research addresses the specific needs and challenges faced by students. Teachers should identify areas where students may be struggling or where improvement is needed, ensuring that the research directly impacts the learning experiences of the students.
• Feasibility and Practicality: The feasibility of the research is crucial. Teachers must choose topics that are practical to implement within the constraints of the classroom setting. This includes considering available resources, time constraints, and the level of support from school administrators.
• Potential for Positive Impact: The ultimate goal of action research is to bring about positive change. Teachers should carefully assess the potential impact of their research, aiming for improvements in teaching methods, student performance, or overall classroom dynamics.

List of Topics for Action Research in the Classroom

• Impact of Mindfulness Practices on Student Focus
• The Effectiveness of Peer Tutoring in Mathematics
• Strategies for Encouraging Critical Thinking in History Classes
• Using Gamification to Enhance Learning in Science
• Investigating the Impact of Flexible Seating Arrangements
• Assessing the Benefits of Project-Based Learning in Language Arts
• The Influence of Classroom Decor on Student Motivation
• Examining the Use of Learning Stations for Differentiation
• Implementing Reflective Journals to Enhance Writing Skills
• Exploring the Impact of Flipped Classroom Models
• Analyzing the Effects of Homework on Student Performance
• The Role of Positive Reinforcement in Classroom Behavior
• Investigating the Impact of Classroom Libraries on Reading Proficiency
• Strategies for Fostering a Growth Mindset in Students
• Assessing the Benefits of Cross-Curricular Integration
• Using Technology to Enhance Vocabulary Acquisition
• The Impact of Outdoor Learning on Student Engagement
• Investigating the Relationship Between Attendance and Academic Success
• The Role of Parental Involvement in Homework Completion
• Assessing the Impact of Classroom Rituals on Community Building
• Strategies for Increasing Student Participation in Discussions
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Lighting on Student Alertness
• Investigating the Impact of Daily Agendas on Time Management
• The Effectiveness of Socratic Seminars in Social Studies
• Analyzing the Use of Graphic Organizers for Concept Mapping
• Implementing Student-Led Conferences for Goal Setting
• Examining the Effects of Mind Mapping on Information Retention
• The Influence of Classroom Temperature on Academic Performance
• Investigating the Benefits of Cooperative Learning Strategies
• Strategies for Addressing Test Anxiety in Students
• Assessing the Impact of Positive Affirmations on Student Confidence
• The Use of Literature Circles to Enhance Reading Comprehension
• Exploring the Effects of Classroom Noise Levels on Concentration
• Investigating the Benefits of Cross-Grade Collaborations
• Analyzing the Impact of Goal Setting on Student Achievement
• Implementing Interactive Notebooks for Conceptual Understanding
• The Effectiveness of Response to Intervention (RTI) Programs
• Strategies for Integrating Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
• Investigating the Impact of Classroom Discussions on Critical Thinking
• The Role of Brain Breaks in Enhancing Student Focus
• Assessing the Benefits of Inquiry-Based Learning in Science
• Exploring the Effects of Music on Studying and Retention
• Investigating the Use of Learning Contracts for Individualized Learning
• The Influence of Classroom Colors on Mood and Learning
• Strategies for Promoting Collaborative Problem-Solving
• Analyzing the Impact of Flexible Scheduling on Student Productivity
• The Effectiveness of Mindful Breathing Exercises on Stress Reduction
• Investigating the Benefits of Service Learning Projects
• The Role of Peer Assessment in Improving Writing Skills
• Exploring the Impact of Field Trips on Cultural Competency
• Assessing the Benefits of Personalized Learning Plans
• Strategies for Differentiating Instruction in Large Classrooms
• Investigating the Influence of Teacher-Student Relationships on Learning
• The Effectiveness of Vocabulary Games in Foreign Language Classes
• Analyzing the Impact of Classroom Discussions on Civic Engagement
• Implementing Goal-Setting Strategies for Test Preparation
• The Role of Classroom Celebrations in Building a Positive Environment
• Strategies for Enhancing Student Reflection and Metacognition
• Investigating the Effects of Positive Behavior Supports (PBS)
• The Influence of Classroom Humor on Student Engagement
• Assessing the Benefits of Student-Led Research Projects
• Exploring the Impact of Timed vs. Untimed Tests on Anxiety
• Investigating the Use of Educational Podcasts for Learning
• The Effectiveness of Debate Activities in Developing Persuasive Skills
• Analyzing the Impact of Mindful Walking Breaks on Concentration
• Strategies for Promoting Digital Citizenship in the Classroom
• The Role of Visualization Techniques in Mathematics Learning
• Assessing the Benefits of Classroom Agreements for Behavior
• Exploring the Effects of Goal-Setting in Physical Education
• Investigating the Influence of Classroom Seating Charts on Behavior
• The Effectiveness of Peer Editing in Improving Writing Skills
• Strategies for Integrating Cultural Competency in History Lessons
• Analyzing the Impact of Classroom Pets on Student Well-Being
• The Role of Morning Meetings in Building Classroom Community
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Learning Centers in Elementary Schools
• Exploring the Effects of Virtual Reality in Geography Education
• Assessing the Impact of Homework Choice on Student Motivation
• Strategies for Promoting Growth Mindset in Mathematics
• The Influence of Classroom Layout on Group Collaboration
• Investigating the Benefits of Mindful Listening Practices
• The Effectiveness of Using Real-World Examples in Science Lessons
• Analyzing the Impact of Student-Led Assessments on Accountability
• Exploring the Use of Learning Contracts for Student Responsibility
• Investigating the Benefits of Teaching Digital Literacy Skills
• Strategies for Implementing Peer Mentoring Programs
• The Role of Graphic Novels in Promoting Literacy
• Assessing the Impact of Flexible Grouping in Mathematics Classes
• The Effectiveness of Using Storytelling for Conceptual Understanding
• Investigating the Influence of Classroom Rituals on Attendance
• Exploring the Benefits of Mindfulness Practices in Physical Education
• Strategies for Integrating Social Justice Education in the Curriculum
• Analyzing the Impact of Goal-Setting on Homework Completion
• The Role of Classroom Mindfulness Activities in Stress Reduction
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Educational Apps for Vocabulary
• The Effectiveness of Using Drama in History Lessons
• Assessing the Impact of Classroom Routines on Time Management
• Exploring the Influence of Teacher-Student Rapport on Academic Achievement
• Strategies for Promoting Active Listening Skills in the Classroom
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Concept Mapping in Science
• The Role of Classroom Socratic Seminars in Developing Critical Thinking
• Assessing the Impact of Mindful Eating Practices on Student Focus
• Exploring the Effects of Flipped Learning in Physical Education
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Educational Games for Math Fluency
• The Effectiveness of Peer Assessment in Art Classes
• Strategies for Fostering Creativity in Science Education
• Analyzing the Impact of Morning Stretches on Student Alertness
• The Role of Classroom Discussions in Enhancing Social Studies Learning
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Augmented Reality in History Lessons
• Assessing the Impact of Growth Mindset Interventions on Test Anxiety
• Strategies for Incorporating Environmental Education in the Curriculum
• The Effectiveness of Using Conceptual Maps in Literature Analysis
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Lighting on Reading Comprehension
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Learning Apps for Language Acquisition
• The Role of Classroom Experiments in Science Education
• Analyzing the Impact of Mindful Breathing Exercises on Test Performance
• Strategies for Promoting Collaborative Problem-Solving in Mathematics
• Assessing the Benefits of Mindfulness Practices in Physical Education
• Exploring the Effects of Flexible Seating on Student Collaboration
• Investigating the Influence of Homework Choice on Student Motivation
• The Effectiveness of Using Educational Podcasts for History Learning
• Strategies for Integrating Sustainability Education Across Subjects
• Analyzing the Impact of Mindful Writing Practices on Language Arts Skills
• The Role of Peer Teaching in Enhancing Understanding of Complex Concepts
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Digital Storytelling in Literature Classes
• The Effectiveness of Inquiry-Based Learning in Social Studies
• Assessing the Impact of Student-Led Book Clubs on Reading Engagement
• Strategies for Incorporating Financial Literacy in Mathematics Education
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Decor on Science Interest
• Investigating the Benefits of Mindful Movement Breaks in the Classroom
• The Role of Reflection Journals in Developing Critical Thinking Skills
• Analyzing the Impact of Virtual Field Trips on Geography Learning
• Strategies for Promoting Inclusive Physical Education Practices
• Assessing the Benefits of Using Educational Board Games for Learning
• The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Practices in Foreign Language Classes
• Investigating the Influence of Classroom Rituals on Academic Rigor
• Exploring the Impact of Student-Led Conferences on Goal Setting
• The Role of Mindful Listening Practices in Improving Communication Skills
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Educational Apps for Science Exploration
• Analyzing the Effectiveness of Socratic Seminars in Philosophy Classes
• Strategies for Promoting Gender Equity in STEM Education
• Assessing the Impact of Classroom Celebrations on Student Well-Being
• The Effectiveness of Using Debate Activities in Language Arts
• Exploring the Influence of Positive Affirmations on Classroom Climate
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Concept Mapping in History Essays
• Strategies for Incorporating Media Literacy in Social Studies
• Analyzing the Impact of Mindful Reflection Practices on Homework Completion
• The Role of Peer Collaboration in Enhancing Artistic Skills
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Educational Apps for Vocabulary Acquisition
• The Effectiveness of Mindful Breathing Exercises in Test Preparation
• Assessing the Impact of Flipped Learning in Science Laboratories
• Strategies for Promoting Civic Engagement in Social Studies Classes
• Exploring the Influence of Outdoor Learning on Scientific Inquiry
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Learning Stations for Literature Analysis
• The Role of Mindful Movement in Improving Physical Education Experiences
• Analyzing the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality in Language Learning
• Strategies for Incorporating Global Perspectives in Geography Education
• Assessing the Impact of Mindful Coloring Activities on Stress Reduction
• The Effectiveness of Using Educational Games for History Review
• Investigating the Benefits of Mindful Breathing Exercises in Mathematics
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Rituals on Study Habits
• The Role of Mindful Listening Practices in Enhancing Oral Communication
• Analyzing the Impact of Student-Led Workshops on Study Skills
• Strategies for Promoting Critical Media Literacy in Language Arts
• Assessing the Benefits of Mindfulness Practices in Physical Fitness
• The Effectiveness of Using Educational Apps for Music Appreciation
• Investigating the Influence of Classroom Decor on Artistic Expression
• Exploring the Impact of Mindful Eating Practices on Nutrition Awareness
• The Role of Peer Assessment in Improving Science Fair Projects
• Analyzing the Benefits of Mindful Breathing Exercises in History Classes
• Strategies for Promoting Teamwork in Physical Education
• Assessing the Impact of Classroom Celebrations on Cultural Understanding
• The Effectiveness of Using Conceptual Maps in Geography Education
• Investigating the Benefits of Mindful Movement Breaks in Mathematics
• The Role of Mindful Listening Practices in Improving Musical Skills
• Analyzing the Impact of Student-Led Discussions in Philosophy Classes
• Strategies for Incorporating Environmental Stewardship in Science Education
• Assessing the Benefits of Using Educational Games for Physical Fitness
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Decor on Mathematical Interest
• Investigating the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality in Art Appreciation
• The Role of Mindful Movement in Enhancing Physical Education Experiences
• Strategies for Promoting Cultural Competency in Language Arts
• Analyzing the Impact of Mindful Breathing Exercises on Test Anxiety
• The Effectiveness of Using Educational Apps for Science Exploration
• Investigating the Benefits of Peer Teaching in Mathematics Classes
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Rituals on Language Arts Skills
• Assessing the Impact of Mindful Coloring Activities on Creative Expression
• The Role of Mindful Listening Practices in Improving Public Speaking
• Investigating the Benefits of Using Learning Stations for History Learning
• The Effectiveness of Peer Assessment in Improving Writing Skills
• Strategies for Promoting Digital Literacy in Geography Education
• Analyzing the Impact of Mindful Eating Practices on Healthy Habits
• Assessing the Benefits of Using Educational Games for Social Studies
• The Effectiveness of Mindful Movement Breaks in Science Education
• Exploring the Influence of Classroom Decor on Writing Motivation
• Investigating the Role of Mindfulness Practices in Mathematics Anxiety
• Strategies for Incorporating Financial Literacy in Social Studies
• Analyzing the Benefits of Using Concept Mapping in Science Labs
• The Role of Mindful Breathing Exercises in Improving Music Education
• Exploring the Impact of Virtual Reality on Foreign Language Acquisition
• Assessing the Benefits of Mindful Movement Breaks in History Classes

Tips for Conducting Action Research in the Classroom

• Setting Clear Research Goals and Objectives: Clearly define the goals and objectives of the research to ensure a focused and purposeful investigation.
• Involving Stakeholders in the Research Process: Engage students, parents, and colleagues in the research process to gather diverse perspectives and insights.
• Collecting and Analyzing Relevant Data: Use a variety of data collection methods, such as surveys, observations, and assessments, to gather comprehensive and meaningful data.
• Reflecting on Findings and Adjusting Teaching Practices: Regularly reflect on the research findings and be open to adjusting teaching practices based on the insights gained from the research.

Case Studies or Examples

Highlighting successful action research projects provides inspiration and practical insights for teachers. 

Sharing case studies or examples of impactful research can demonstrate the positive outcomes and improvements that can result from well-conducted action research.

In conclusion, action research is a valuable tool for educators seeking to enhance their teaching practices and improve student outcomes. 

Selecting the right topics from a list of topics for action research in the classroom is crucial for the success of action research projects, and teachers should consider alignment with goals, relevance to students, feasibility, and potential impact. 

By exploring a diverse range of topics, teachers can embark on meaningful action research journeys, contributing to the continuous improvement of education.

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Expert educators of multilingual learners share their tips with WIDA Founder and Director Tim Boals.

• Action Research: A catalyst for comprehensive teaching and learning in multilingual contexts

This WIDA Snapshot introduces classroom action research – when researchers and educators work together to address classroom challenges – by encouraging teachers to use their researcher voices to make meaningful contributions to the field, whether through collaborative or independent approaches.

Action research is dynamic and participatory and has become a cornerstone of education research. It enables teachers understanding, analysis, and reflection to address classroom challenges, while building comprehensive and robust classroom teaching practices at the same time.

For example, scholars continually work with teachers on research initiatives that inform educational theoretical approaches. Beyond this, however, there is something inherently important about giving practitioners a voice in education research (Alrichter, 1993) and especially in language learning (Edwards & Burns, 2015).

What does action research look like for teachers who work with multilingual learners? Embracing multilingualism in the classroom requires awareness and understanding of students’ cross-cultural, social, cognitive, and economic benefits (Martinez, 2018). It also relies on practitioners making informed, evidence-based decisions to influence education for multilingual language development. The voices of practitioners are key to the development of education methods; hence scholars have provided multiple avenues to engage teachers in action research (Sagor, 2000; Burns, 2009).

WIDA’s work in language development has always focused on impact at the classroom level. To this end, practitioners can lay important groundwork to identify and implement strategies that are evidence-based. These practices also include systematically collecting and analyzing data and introducing practices to let teachers as practitioners engage in reflective processes. Letting practitioners gain insights on their work effectiveness and make the needed changes and adaptations is a win-win approach. Through its Marco DALE , Marco ALE and ELD Standards Framework , WIDA is offering not only resources that meet the diverse needs of bilingual learners in the classroom, but also themes that can be explored through action research. The results can then be used to inform changes and updates to instruction.

By pairing frameworks and classroom realities with action research, teachers can promote a student- and learning-centered approach, where we can directly address distinct types of challenges, including language barriers, various levels of language proficiency, diverse cultural backgrounds, and the task of building a more inclusive language learning experience. By providing a nuanced understanding of language development, we can empower our teachers to explore the complexities of language and spark curiosity related to concepts like translanguaging, transculturalism, multiliteracies, equity, and interaction into the curriculum to provide the needed learning supports.

A concrete example of action research has been my experience mentoring teachers in Croatia and Algeria, where we experimented with integrating technology (AI) and differentiated instruction to help us make decisions on levels of engagement, increasing motivation, making learning relatable and building a professional development approach through research to support teachers and learners. The framework we developed builds on achieving evidence-based, and culturally responsive teaching practices that are essential for shaping the new citizens of the world.

As a practitioner and now dedicated to research, I have seen the benefits that action research can have on simple things, including giving instructions, promoting engagement, and developing reflective practices among learners. Because of my background and 30-year career in education, I have seen firsthand how action research stands as a transformative tool for educators building empowerment and bridging theory and practice from those who know best: the teachers.

Action Research Plan

Want to get started? Keep in mind these ideas:

• Action research is not a linear process
• Focus on one specific classroom issue at a time
• Develop a research question (or questions)
• It helps to read the literature, talk to experts, or listen to others discuss the topic
• Plan how to collect and analyze data
• Create a potential roadmap and reflect on it frequently
• Evaluate and readjust as necessary
• Build a network of peer action researchers within your school or district

Remember: you will not only be contributing to addressing challenges in your classroom, but your work is a contribution to the field of language development and education in general.

About the Author

As researcher for WIDA Español, Grazzia Maria Mendoza facilitates research processes and the design of professional development resources through innovation, contextualization during implementation, and the promotion of complex, consistent and quality research.

Altrichter, H. (1993). The concept of quality in action research: Giving practitioners a voice in educational research. Qualitative Voices in Educational Research. Routledge.

Burns, A (2009). Doing Action Research in Language Teaching. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203863466 

Edwards, E. & Burns, A. (2015). Language teacher action research: achieving sustainability. ELT Journal, 70(1), 6-15 https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccv060

Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34-46 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x

Martínez, R. A. (2018). Beyond the English learner label: Recognizing the richness of bi/multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires. The Reading Teacher, 71(5), 515-522. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1679

Miller, I. K., Cunha, M. I. A., & Allwright, D. (2021). Teachers as practitioners of learning: the lens of exploratory practice. Educational Action Research, 29(3), 447–461. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2020.1842780

Sagor, R. (2000). Guiding school improvement with action research. ASCD.

About WIDA Snapshots

WIDA Snapshots introduce topics of interest to educators and families of multilingual learners from Pre-K through grade 12.

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Action research in the classroom: A teacher's guide

November 26, 2021

Discover best practices for action research in the classroom, guiding teachers on implementing and facilitating impactful studies in schools.

Main, P (2021, November 26). Action research in the classroom: A teacher's guide. Retrieved from https://www.structural-learning.com/post/action-research-in-the-classroom-a-teachers-guide

What is action research?

Action research is a participatory process designed to empower educators to examine and improve their own practice. It is characterized by a cycle of planning , action, observation, and reflection, with the goal of achieving a deeper understanding of practice within educational contexts. This process encourages a wide range of approaches and can be adapted to various social contexts.

At its core, action research involves critical reflection on one's actions as a basis for improvement. Senior leaders and teachers are guided to reflect on their educational strategies , classroom management, and student engagement techniques. It's a collaborative effort that often involves not just the teachers but also the students and other stakeholders, fostering an inclusive process that values the input of all participants.

The action research process is iterative, with each cycle aiming to bring about a clearer understanding and improvement in practice. It typically begins with the identification of real-world problems within the school environment, followed by a circle of planning where strategies are developed to address these issues. The implementation of these strategies is then observed and documented, often through journals or participant observation, allowing for reflection and analysis.

The insights gained from action research contribute to Organization Development, enhancing the quality of teaching and learning. This approach is strongly aligned with the principles of Quality Assurance in Education, ensuring that the actions taken are effective and responsive to the needs of the school community.

Educators can share their findings in community forums or through publications in journals, contributing to the wider theory about practice . Tertiary education sector often draws on such studies to inform teacher training and curriculum development.

In summary, the significant parts of action research include:

• A continuous cycle of planning, action, observation, and reflection.
• A focus on reflective practice to achieve a deeper understanding of educational methodologies.
• A commitment to inclusive and participatory processes that engage the entire school community.

Creating an action research project

The action research process usually begins with a situation or issue that a teacher wants to change as part of school improvement initiatives .

Teachers get support in changing the ' interesting issue ' into a 'researchable question' and then taking to experiment. The teacher will draw on the outcomes of other researchers to help build actions and reveal the consequences .

Participatory action research is a strategy to the enquiry which has been utilised since the 1940s. Participatory action involves researchers and other participants taking informed action to gain knowledge of a problematic situation and change it to bring a positive effect. As an action researcher , a teacher carries out research . Enquiring into their practice would lead a teacher to question the norms and assumptions that are mostly overlooked in normal school life . Making a routine of inquiry can provide a commitment to learning and professional development . A teacher-researcher holds the responsibility for being the source and agent of change.

Examples of action research projects in education include a teacher working with students to improve their reading comprehension skills , a group of teachers collaborating to develop and implement a new curriculum, or a school administrator conducting a study on the effectiveness of a school-wide behavior management program.

In each of these cases, the research is aimed at improving the educational experience for students and addressing a specific issue or problem within the school community . Action research can be a powerful tool for educators to improve their practice and make a positive impact on their students' learning.

Potential research questions could include:

• How can dual-coding be used to improve my students memory ?
• Does mind-mapping lead to creativity?
• How does Oracy improve my classes writing?
• How can we advance critical thinking in year 10?
• How can graphic organisers be used for exam preparation?

Regardless of the types of action research your staff engage in, a solid cycle of inquiry is an essential aspect of the action research spiral. Building in the process of reflection will ensure that key points of learning can be extracted from the action research study.

What is an action research cycle?

Action research in education is a cycle of reflection and action inquiry , which follows these steps:

1. Identifying the problem

It is the first stage of action research that starts when a teacher identifies a problem or question that they want to address. To make an a ction research approach successful, the teacher needs to ensure that the questions are the ones 'they' wish to solve. Their questions might involve social sciences, instructional strategies, everyday life and social management issues, guide for students analytical research methods for improving specific student performance or curriculum implementation etc. Teachers may seek help from a wide variety of existing literature , to find strategies and solutions that others have executed to solve any particular problem. It is also suggested to build a visual map or a table of problems, target performances, potential solutions and supporting references in the middle.

2. Developing an Action Plan

After identifying the problem, after r eviewing the relevant literature and describing the vision of how to solve the problem; the next step would be action planning which means to develop a plan of action . Action planning involves studying the literature and brainstorming can be used by the action research planner to create new techniques and strategies that can generate better results of both action learning and action research. One may go back to the visual map or table of contents and reorder or colour-code the potential outcomes. The items in the list can be ranked in order of significance and the amount of time needed for these strategies.

An action plan has the details of how to implement each idea and the factors that may keep them from their vision of success . Identify those factors that cannot be changed –these are the constants in an equation. The focus of action research at the planning stage must remain focused on the variables –the factors that can be changed using actions. An action plan must be how to implement a solution and how one's instruction, management style, and behaviour will affect each of the variables.

3. Data Collection

Before starting to implement a plan of action , the researcher must have a complete understanding of action research and must have knowledge of the type of data that may help in the success of the plan and must assess how to collect that data. For instance, if the goal is to improve class attendance, attendance records must be collected as useful data for the participatory action. If the goal is to improve time management, the data may include students and classroom observations . There are many options to choose from to collect data from. Selecting the most suitable methodology for data collection will provide more meaningful , accurate and valid data. Some sources of data are interviews and observation. Also, one may administer surveys , distribute questionnaires and watch videotapes of the classroom to collect data.

4. Data Analysis and Conclusions

At this action stage, an action researcher analyses the collected data and concludes. It is suggested to assess the data during the predefined process of data collection as it will help refine the action research agenda. If the collected data seems insufficient , the data collection plan must be revised. Data analysis also helps to reflect on what exactly happened. Did the action researcher perform the actions as planned? Were the study outcomes as expected? Which assumptions of the action researcher proved to be incorrect?

Adding details such as tables, opinions, and recommendations can help in identifying trends (correlations and relationships). One must share the findings while analysing data and drawing conclusions . Engaging in conversations for teacher growth is essential; hence, the action researcher would share the findings with other teachers through discussion of action research, who can yield useful feedback. One may also share the findings with students, as they can also provide additional insight . For example, if teachers and students agree with the conclusions of action research for educational change, it adds to the credibility of the data collection plan and analysis. If they don't seem to agree with the data collection plan and analysis , the action researchers may take informed action and refine the data collection plan and reevaluate conclusions .

5. Modifying the Educational Theory and Repeat

After concluding, the process begins again. The teacher can adjust different aspects of the action research approach to theory or make it more specific according to the findings . Action research guides how to change the steps of action research development, how to modify the action plan , and provide better access to resources, start data collection once again, or prepare new questions to ask from the respondents.

6. Report the Findings

Since the main approach to action research involves the informed action to introduce useful change into the classroom or schools, one must not forget to share the outcomes with others. Sharing the outcomes would help to further reflect on the problem and process, and it would help other teachers to use these findings to enhance their professional practice as an educator. One may print book and share the experience with the school leaders, principal, teachers and students as they served as guide to action research. Or, a community action researcher may present community-based action research at a conference so people from other areas can take advantage of this collaborative action. Also, teachers may use a digital storytelling tool to outline their results.

There are plenty of creative tools we can use to bring the research projects to life. We have seen videos, podcasts and research posters all being used to communicate the results of these programs. Community action research is a unique way to present details of the community-related adventures in the teacher profession, cultivate expertise and show how teachers think about education , so it is better to find unique ways to report the findings of community-led action research.

Final thoughts on action-research for teachers

As we have seen, action research can be an effective form of professional development, illuminating the path for teachers and school leaders seeking to refine their craft. This cyclical process of inquiry and reflection is not merely a methodological pursuit but a profound professional journey. The definition of action research, as a systematic inquiry conducted by teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders in the teaching/learning environment, emphasizes the collaborative nature of improving educational strategies and outcomes.

Action research transcends traditional disciplinary practices by immersing educators in the social contexts of their work, prompting them to question and adapt their methods to meet the evolving needs of their students . It is a form of reflective practice that demands critical thinking and flexibility, as one navigates through the iterative stages of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting.

The process of action research is inherently participatory, encouraging educators to engage with their learning communities to address key issues and social issues that impact educational settings. This method empowers professionals within universities and schools alike to take ownership of their learning and development, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and participatory approaches.

In summary, action research encapsulates the essence of what it means to be a learning professional in a dynamic educational landscape. It is the embodiment of a commitment to lifelong learning and a testament to the capacity of educators to enact change . The value of action research lies in its ability to transform practitioners into researchers, where the quest for knowledge becomes a powerful conduit for change and innovation. Thus, for educators at every level, embracing the rigorous yet rewarding path of action research can unveil potent insights and propel educational practice to new heights.

Key Papers on Action Research

• Utilizing Action Research During Student Teaching by James O. Barbre and Brenda J. Buckner (2013): This study explores how action research can be effectively utilized during student teaching to enhance professional pedagogical disposition through active reflection. It emphasizes developing a reflective habit of mind crucial for teachers to be effective in their classrooms and adaptive to the changing needs of their students.
• Repositioning T eacher Action Research in Science Teacher Education by B. Capobianco and A. Feldman (2010): This paper discusses the promotion of action research as a way for teachers to improve their practice and students' learning for over 50 years, focusing on science education. It highlights the importance of action research in advancing knowledge about teaching and learning in science.
• Action research and teacher leadership by K. Smeets and P. Ponte (2009): This article reports on a case study into the influence and impact of action research carried out by teachers in a special school. It found that action research not only helps teachers to get to grips with their work in the classroom but also has an impact on the work of others in the school.
• Teaching about the Nature of Science through History: Action Research in the Classroom by J. Solomon, Jon Duveen, Linda Scot, S. McCarthy (1992): This article reports on 18 months of action research monitoring British pupils' learning about the nature of science using historical aspects. It indicates areas of substantial progress in pupils' understanding of the nature of science.
• Action Research in the Classroom by V. Baumfield, E. Hall, K. Wall (2008): This comprehensive guide to conducting action research in the classroom covers various aspects, including deciding on a research question, choosing complementary research tools, collecting and interpreting data, and sharing findings. It aims to move classroom inquiry forward and contribute to professional development.

These studies highlight the significant role of action research in enhancing teacher effectiveness, student learning outcomes, and contributing to the broader educational community's knowledge and practices.

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4 Preparing for Action Research in the Classroom: Practical Issues

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

• What sort of considerations are necessary to take action in your educational context?
• How do you facilitate an action plan without disrupting your teaching?
• How do you respond when the unplanned happens during data collection?

An action research project is a practical endeavor that will ultimately be shaped by your educational context and practice. Now that you have developed a literature review, you are ready to revise your initial plans and begin to plan your project. This chapter will provide some advice about your considerations when undertaking an action research project in your classroom.

Maintain Focus

Hopefully, you found a lot a research on your topic. If so, you will now have a better understanding of how it fits into your area and field of educational research. Even though the topic and area you are researching may not be small, your study itself should clearly focus on one aspect of the topic in your classroom. It is important to maintain clarity about what you are investigating because a lot will be going on simultaneously during the research process and you do not want to spend precious time on erroneous aspects that are irrelevant to your research.

Even though you may view your practice as research, and vice versa, you might want to consider your research project as a projection or megaphone for your work that will bring attention to the small decisions that make a difference in your educational context. From experience, our concern is that you will find that researching one aspect of your practice will reveal other interconnected aspects that you may find interesting, and you will disorient yourself researching in a confluence of interests, commitments, and purposes. We simply want to emphasize – don’t try to research everything at once. Stay focused on your topic, and focus on exploring it in depth, instead of its many related aspects. Once you feel you have made progress in one aspect, you can then progress to other related areas, as new research projects that continue the research cycle.

Identify a Clear Research Question

Your literature review should have exposed you to an array of research questions related to your topic. More importantly, your review should have helped identify which research questions we have addressed as a field, and which ones still need to be addressed . More than likely your research questions will resemble ones from your literature review, while also being distinguishable based upon your own educational context and the unexplored areas of research on your topic.

Regardless of how your research question took shape, it is important to be clear about what you are researching in your educational context. Action research questions typically begin in ways related to “How does … ?” or “How do I/we … ?”, for example:

Research Question Examples

• How does a semi-structured morning meeting improve my classroom community?
• How does historical fiction help students think about people’s agency in the past?
• How do I improve student punctuation use through acting out sentences?
• How do we increase student responsibility for their own learning as a team of teachers?

I particularly favor questions with I or we, because they emphasize that you, the actor and researcher, will be clearly taking action to improve your practice. While this may seem rather easy, you need to be aware of asking the right kind of question. One issue is asking a too pointed and closed question that limits the possibility for analysis. These questions tend to rely on quantitative answers, or yes/no answers. For example, “How many students got a 90% or higher on the exam, after reviewing the material three times?

Another issue is asking a question that is too broad, or that considers too many variables. For example, “How does room temperature affect students’ time-on-task?” These are obviously researchable questions, but the aim is a cause-and-effect relationship between variables that has little or no value to your daily practice.

I also want to point out that your research question will potentially change as the research develops. If you consider the question:

As you do an activity, you may find that students are more comfortable and engaged by acting sentences out in small groups, instead of the whole class. Therefore, your question may shift to:

• How do I improve student punctuation use through acting out sentences, in small groups ?

By simply engaging in the research process and asking questions, you will open your thinking to new possibilities and you will develop new understandings about yourself and the problematic aspects of your educational context.

Understand Your Capabilities and Know that Change Happens Slowly

Similar to your research question, it is important to have a clear and realistic understanding of what is possible to research in your specific educational context. For example, would you be able to address unsatisfactory structures (policies and systems) within your educational context? Probably not immediately, but over time you potentially could. It is much more feasible to think of change happening in smaller increments, from within your own classroom or context, with you as one change agent. For example, you might find it particularly problematic that your school or district places a heavy emphasis on traditional grades, believing that these grades are often not reflective of the skills students have or have not mastered. Instead of attempting to research grading practices across your school or district, your research might instead focus on determining how to provide more meaningful feedback to students and parents about progress in your course. While this project identifies and addresses a structural issue that is part of your school and district context, to keep things manageable, your research project would focus the outcomes on your classroom. The more research you do related to the structure of your educational context the more likely modifications will emerge. The more you understand these modifications in relation to the structural issues you identify within your own context, the more you can influence others by sharing your work and enabling others to understand the modification and address structural issues within their contexts. Throughout your project, you might determine that modifying your grades to be standards-based is more effective than traditional grades, and in turn, that sharing your research outcomes with colleagues at an in-service presentation prompts many to adopt a similar model in their own classrooms. It can be defeating to expect the world to change immediately, but you can provide the spark that ignites coordinated changes. In this way, action research is a powerful methodology for enacting social change. Action research enables individuals to change their own lives, while linking communities of like-minded practitioners who work towards action.

Plan Thoughtfully

Planning thoughtfully involves having a path in mind, but not necessarily having specific objectives. Due to your experience with students and your educational context, the research process will often develop in ways as you expected, but at times it may develop a little differently, which may require you to shift the research focus and change your research question. I will suggest a couple methods to help facilitate this potential shift. First, you may want to develop criteria for gauging the effectiveness of your research process. You may need to refine and modify your criteria and your thinking as you go. For example, we often ask ourselves if action research is encouraging depth of analysis beyond my typical daily pedagogical reflection. You can think about this as you are developing data collection methods and even when you are collecting data. The key distinction is whether the data you will be collecting allows for nuance among the participants or variables. This does not mean that you will have nuance, but it should allow for the possibility. Second, criteria are shaped by our values and develop into standards of judgement. If we identify criteria such as teacher empowerment, then we will use that standard to think about the action contained in our research process. Our values inform our work; therefore, our work should be judged in relation to the relevance of our values in our pedagogy and practice.

Does Your Timeline Work?

While action research is situated in the temporal span that is your life, your research project is short-term, bounded, and related to the socially mediated practices within your educational context. The timeline is important for bounding, or setting limits to your research project, while also making sure you provide the right amount of time for the data to emerge from the process.

For example, if you are thinking about examining the use of math diaries in your classroom, you probably do not want to look at a whole semester of entries because that would be a lot of data, with entries related to a wide range of topics. This would create a huge data analysis endeavor. Therefore, you may want to look at entries from one chapter or unit of study. Also, in terms of timelines, you want to make sure participants have enough time to develop the data you collect. Using the same math example, you would probably want students to have plenty of time to write in the journals, and also space out the entries over the span of the chapter or unit.

In relation to the examples, we think it is an important mind shift to not think of research timelines in terms of deadlines. It is vitally important to provide time and space for the data to emerge from the participants. Therefore, it would be potentially counterproductive to rush a 50-minute data collection into 20 minutes – like all good educators, be flexible in the research process.

Involve Others

It is important to not isolate yourself when doing research. Many educators are already isolated when it comes to practice in their classroom. The research process should be an opportunity to engage with colleagues and open up your classroom to discuss issues that are potentially impacting your entire educational context. Think about the following relationships:

Research participants

You may invite a variety of individuals in your educational context, many with whom you are in a shared situation (e.g. colleagues, administrators). These participants may be part of a collaborative study, they may simply help you develop data collection instruments or intervention items, or they may help to analyze and make sense of the data. While the primary research focus will be you and your learning, you will also appreciate how your learning is potentially influencing the quality of others’ learning.

We always tell educators to be public about your research, or anything exciting that is happening in your educational context, for that matter. In terms of research, you do not want it to seem mysterious to any stakeholder in the educational context. Invite others to visit your setting and observe your research process, and then ask for their formal feedback. Inviting others to your classroom will engage and connect you with other stakeholders, while also showing that your research was established in an ethic of respect for multiple perspectives.

Critical friends or validators

Using critical friends is one way to involve colleagues and also validate your findings and conclusions. While your positionality will shape the research process and subsequently your interpretations of the data, it is important to make sure that others see similar logic in your process and conclusions. Critical friends or validators provide some level of certification that the frameworks you use to develop your research project and make sense of your data are appropriate for your educational context. Your critical friends and validators’ suggestions will be useful if you develop a report or share your findings, but most importantly will provide you confidence moving forward.

Potential researchers

As an educational researcher, you are involved in ongoing improvement plans and district or systemic change. The flexibility of action research allows it to be used in a variety of ways, and your initial research can spark others in your context to engage in research either individually for their own purposes, or collaboratively as a grade level, team, or school. Collaborative inquiry with other educators is an emerging form of professional learning and development for schools with school improvement plans. While they call it collaborative inquiry, these schools are often using an action research model. It is good to think of all of your colleagues as potential research collaborators in the future.

Prioritize Ethical Practice

Try to always be cognizant of your own positionality during the action research process, its relation to your educational context, and any associated power relation to your positionality. Furthermore, you want to make sure that you are not coercing or engaging participants into harmful practices. While this may seem obvious, you may not even realize you are harming your participants because you believe the action is necessary for the research process.

For example, commonly teachers want to try out an intervention that will potentially positively impact their students. When the teacher sets up the action research study, they may have a control group and an experimental group. There is potential to impair the learning of one of these groups if the intervention is either highly impactful or exceedingly worse than the typical instruction. Therefore, teachers can sometimes overlook the potential harm to students in pursuing an experimental method of exploring an intervention.

If you are working with a university researcher, ethical concerns will be covered by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). If not, your school or district may have a process or form that you would need to complete, so it would beneficial to check your district policies before starting. Other widely accepted aspects of doing ethically informed research, include:

Confirm Awareness of Study and Negotiate Access – with authorities, participants and parents, guardians, caregivers and supervisors (with IRB this is done with Informed Consent).

• Promise to Uphold Confidentiality – Uphold confidentiality, to your fullest ability, to protect information, identity and data. You can identify people if they indicate they want to be recognized for their contributions.
• Ensure participants’ rights to withdraw from the study at any point .
• Make sure data is secured, either on password protected computer or lock drawer .

Prepare to Problematize your Thinking

Educational researchers who are more philosophically-natured emphasize that research is not about finding solutions, but instead is about creating and asking new and more precise questions. This is represented in the action research process shown in the diagrams in Chapter 1, as Collingwood (1939) notes the aim in human interaction is always to keep the conversation open, while Edward Said (1997) emphasized that there is no end because whatever we consider an end is actually the beginning of something entirely new. These reflections have perspective in evaluating the quality in research and signifying what is “good” in “good pedagogy” and “good research”. If we consider that action research is about studying and reflecting on one’s learning and how that learning influences practice to improve it, there is nothing to stop your line of inquiry as long as you relate it to improving practice. This is why it is necessary to problematize and scrutinize our practices.

Ethical Dilemmas for Educator-Researchers

Classroom teachers are increasingly expected to demonstrate a disposition of reflection and inquiry into their own practice. Many advocate for schools to become research centers, and to produce their own research studies, which is an important advancement in acknowledging and addressing the complexity in today’s schools. When schools conduct their own research studies without outside involvement, they bypass outside controls over their studies. Schools shift power away from the oversight of outside experts and ethical research responsibilities are shifted to those conducting the formal research within their educational context. Ethics firmly grounded and established in school policies and procedures for teaching, becomes multifaceted when teaching practice and research occur simultaneously. When educators conduct research in their classrooms, are they doing so as teachers or as researchers, and if they are researchers, at what point does the teaching role change to research? Although the notion of objectivity is a key element in traditional research paradigms, educator-based research acknowledges a subjective perspective as the educator-researcher is not viewed separately from the research. In action research, unlike traditional research, the educator as researcher gains access to the research site by the nature of the work they are paid and expected to perform. The educator is never detached from the research and remains at the research site both before and after the study. Because studying one’s practice comprises working with other people, ethical deliberations are inevitable. Educator-researchers confront role conflict and ambiguity regarding ethical issues such as informed consent from participants, protecting subjects (students) from harm, and ensuring confidentiality. They must demonstrate a commitment toward fully understanding ethical dilemmas that present themselves within the unique set of circumstances of the educational context. Questions about research ethics can feel exceedingly complex and in specific situations, educator- researchers require guidance from others.

Think about it this way. As a part-time historian and former history teacher I often problematized who we regard as good and bad people in history. I (Clark) grew up minutes from Jesse James’ childhood farm. Jesse James is a well-documented thief, and possibly by today’s standards, a terrorist. He is famous for daylight bank robberies, as well as the sheer number of successful robberies. When Jesse James was assassinated, by a trusted associate none-the-less, his body travelled the country for people to see, while his assailant and assailant’s brother reenacted the assassination over 1,200 times in theaters across the country. Still today in my hometown, they reenact Jesse James’ daylight bank robbery each year at the Fall Festival, immortalizing this thief and terrorist from our past. This demonstrates how some people saw him as somewhat of hero, or champion of some sort of resistance, both historically and in the present. I find this curious and ripe for further inquiry, but primarily it is problematic for how we think about people as good or bad in the past. Whatever we may individually or collectively think about Jesse James as a “good” or “bad” person in history, it is vitally important to problematize our thinking about him. Talking about Jesse James may seem strange, but it is relevant to the field of action research. If we tell people that we are engaging in important and “good” actions, we should be prepared to justify why it is “good” and provide a theoretical, epistemological, or ontological rationale if possible. Experience is never enough, you need to justify why you act in certain ways and not others, and this includes thinking critically about your own thinking.

Educators who view inquiry and research as a facet of their professional identity must think critically about how to design and conduct research in educational settings to address respect, justice, and beneficence to minimize harm to participants. This chapter emphasized the due diligence involved in ethically planning the collection of data, and in considering the challenges faced by educator-researchers in educational contexts.

Planning Action

After the thinking about the considerations above, you are now at the stage of having selected a topic and reflected on different aspects of that topic. You have undertaken a literature review and have done some reading which has enriched your understanding of your topic. As a result of your reading and further thinking, you may have changed or fine-tuned the topic you are exploring. Now it is time for action. In the last section of this chapter, we will address some practical issues of carrying out action research, drawing on both personal experiences of supervising educator-researchers in different settings and from reading and hearing about action research projects carried out by other researchers.

Engaging in an action research can be a rewarding experience, but a beneficial action research project does not happen by accident – it requires careful planning, a flexible approach, and continuous educator-researcher reflection. Although action research does not have to go through a pre-determined set of steps, it is useful here for you to be aware of the progression which we presented in Chapter 2. The sequence of activities we suggested then could be looked on as a checklist for you to consider before planning the practical aspects of your project.

We also want to provide some questions for you to think about as you are about to begin.

• Have you identified a topic for study?
• What is the specific context for the study? (It may be a personal project for you or for a group of researchers of which you are a member.)
• Have you read a sufficient amount of the relevant literature?
• Have you developed your research question(s)?
• Have you assessed the resource needed to complete the research?

As you start your project, it is worth writing down:

• a working title for your project, which you may need to refine later;
• the background of the study , both in terms of your professional context and personal motivation;
• the aims of the project;
• the specific outcomes you are hoping for.

Although most of the models of action research presented in Chapter 1 suggest action taking place in some pre-defined order, they also allow us the possibility of refining our ideas and action in the light of our experiences and reflections. Changes may need to be made in response to your evaluation and your reflections on how the project is progressing. For example, you might have to make adjustments, taking into account the students’ responses, your observations and any observations of your colleagues. All this is very useful and, in fact, it is one of the features that makes action research suitable for educational research.

Action research planning sheet

In the past, we have provided action researchers with the following planning list that incorporates all of these considerations. Again, like we have said many times, this is in no way definitive, or lock-in-step procedure you need to follow, but instead guidance based on our perspective to help you engage in the action research process. The left column is the simplified version, and the right column offers more specific advice if need.

Figure 4.1 Planning Sheet for Action Research

Action Research Copyright © by J. Spencer Clark; Suzanne Porath; Julie Thiele; and Morgan Jobe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How Teachers Can Learn Through Action Research

A look at one school’s action research project provides a blueprint for using this model of collaborative teacher learning.

When teachers redesign learning experiences to make school more relevant to students’ lives, they can’t ignore assessment. For many teachers, the most vexing question about real-world learning experiences such as project-based learning is: How will we know what students know and can do by the end of this project?

Teachers at the Siena School in Silver Spring, Maryland, decided to figure out the assessment question by investigating their classroom practices. As a result of their action research, they now have a much deeper understanding of authentic assessment and a renewed appreciation for the power of learning together.

Their research process offers a replicable model for other schools interested in designing their own immersive professional learning. The process began with a real-world challenge and an open-ended question, involved a deep dive into research, and ended with a public showcase of findings.

Start With an Authentic Need to Know

Siena School serves about 130 students in grades 4–12 who have mild to moderate language-based learning differences, including dyslexia. Most students are one to three grade levels behind in reading.

Teachers have introduced a variety of instructional strategies, including project-based learning, to better meet students’ learning needs and also help them develop skills like collaboration and creativity. Instead of taking tests and quizzes, students demonstrate what they know in a PBL unit by making products or generating solutions.

“We were already teaching this way,” explained Simon Kanter, Siena’s director of technology. “We needed a way to measure, was authentic assessment actually effective? Does it provide meaningful feedback? Can teachers grade it fairly?”

Focus the Research Question

Across grade levels and departments, teachers considered what they wanted to learn about authentic assessment, which the late Grant Wiggins described as engaging, multisensory, feedback-oriented, and grounded in real-world tasks. That’s a contrast to traditional tests and quizzes, which tend to focus on recall rather than application and have little in common with how experts go about their work in disciplines like math or history.

The teachers generated a big research question: Is using authentic assessment an effective and engaging way to provide meaningful feedback for teachers and students about growth and proficiency in a variety of learning objectives, including 21st-century skills?

Take Time to Plan

Next, teachers planned authentic assessments that would generate data for their study. For example, middle school science students created prototypes of genetically modified seeds and pitched their designs to a panel of potential investors. They had to not only understand the science of germination but also apply their knowledge and defend their thinking.

In other classes, teachers planned everything from mock trials to environmental stewardship projects to assess student learning and skill development. A shared rubric helped the teachers plan high-quality assessments.

Make Sense of Data

During the data-gathering phase, students were surveyed after each project about the value of authentic assessments versus more traditional tools like tests and quizzes. Teachers also reflected after each assessment.

“We collated the data, looked for trends, and presented them back to the faculty,” Kanter said.

Among the takeaways:

• Authentic assessment generates more meaningful feedback and more opportunities for students to apply it.
• Students consider authentic assessment more engaging, with increased opportunities to be creative, make choices, and collaborate.
• Teachers are thinking more critically about creating assessments that allow for differentiation and that are applicable to students’ everyday lives.

To make their learning public, Siena hosted a colloquium on authentic assessment for other schools in the region. The school also submitted its research as part of an accreditation process with the Middle States Association.

Strategies to Share

For other schools interested in conducting action research, Kanter highlighted three key strategies.

• Focus on areas of growth, not deficiency:  “This would have been less successful if we had said, ‘Our math scores are down. We need a new program to get scores up,’ Kanter said. “That puts the onus on teachers. Data collection could seem punitive. Instead, we focused on the way we already teach and thought about, how can we get more accurate feedback about how students are doing?”
• Foster a culture of inquiry:  Encourage teachers to ask questions, conduct individual research, and share what they learn with colleagues. “Sometimes, one person attends a summer workshop and then shares the highlights in a short presentation. That might just be a conversation, or it might be the start of a school-wide initiative,” Kanter explained. In fact, that’s exactly how the focus on authentic assessment began.
• Build structures for teacher collaboration:  Using staff meetings for shared planning and problem-solving fosters a collaborative culture. That was already in place when Siena embarked on its action research, along with informal brainstorming to support students.

For both students and staff, the deep dive into authentic assessment yielded “dramatic impact on the classroom,” Kanter added. “That’s the great part of this.”

In the past, he said, most teachers gave traditional final exams. To alleviate students’ test anxiety, teachers would support them with time for content review and strategies for study skills and test-taking.

“This year looks and feels different,” Kanter said. A week before the end of fall term, students were working hard on final products, but they weren’t cramming for exams. Teachers had time to give individual feedback to help students improve their work. “The whole climate feels way better.”

Action Research

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J. Spencer Clark, Kansas State University

Suzanne Porath, Kansas State University

Julie Thiele, Kansas State University

Morgan Jobe, Kansas State University

Copyright Year: 2020

Last Update: 2024

ISBN 13: 9781944548292

Publisher: New Prairie Press

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• About the Authors
• What is Action Research for Classroom Teachers?
• Action Research as a Process for Professional Learning and Leadership
• Planning Your Research: Reviewing the Literature and Developing Questions
• Preparing for Action Research in the Classroom: Practical Issues
• Collecting Data in Your Classroom
• Analyzing Data from Your Classroom
• Let it Be Known! Sharing your Results
• The Action Research Process from a High School ELA Teacher’s Perspective

Ancillary Material

About the book.

Action research is a common journey for graduate students in education and other human science fields. This book attempts to meet the needs of graduate students, in-service teachers, and any other educators interested in action research and/or self-study. The chapters of this book draw on our collective experiences as educators in a variety of educational contexts, and our roles guiding educator/researchers in various settings. All of our experiences have enabled us to question and refine our own understanding of action research as a process and means for pedagogical improvement. The primary purpose of this book is to offer clear steps and practical guidance to those who intend to carry out action research for the first time. As educators begin their action research journey, we feel it is vital to pose four questions: 1) What is action research, and how is it distinct from other educational research?; 2) When is it appropriate for an educator to conduct an action research project in their context?; 3) How does an educator conduct an action research project?; 4) What does an educator do with the data once the action research project has been conducted? We have attempted to address all four questions in the chapters of this book.

About the Contributors

J. Spencer Clark is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies at Kansas State University. He has used action research methodology for the past 17 years, in K-12 schools and higher education. More recently, for the past 10 years he has taught action research methods to teachers in graduate and licensure degree programs. He also has led secondary student action research projects in Indiana, Utah, and Kansas. Clark also utilizes action research methodology in his own research. Much of his research has focused on understanding and developing teacher agency through clinical and professional learning experiences that utilize aspects of digital communication, inquiry, collaboration, and personalized learning. He has published in a variety of journals and edited books on teacher education, technology, inquiry-based learning, and curriculum development.

Suzanne Porath has been an English Language Arts, history, and humanities classroom teacher and reading teacher for 13 years before becoming a teacher educator. She has taught in Wisconsin and American international schools in Brazil, Lithuania, and Aruba when she conducted her own action research projects. Before accepting her current position as an assistant professor at Kansas State University in Curriculum and Instruction, she taught at Concordia University and Edgewood College in Wisconsin. She has taught action research methods at the graduate level and facilitated professional development through action research in school districts. She is the lead editor of Networks: An Online Journal for Teacher Research  https://newprairiepress.org/networks/ .

Julie Thiele , PhD. is an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University.  She teaches math education courses, math and science education courses and graduate research courses. Prior to teaching at KSU, she taught elementary and middle school, and led her district level professional learning community, focusing on implementing effective, research-based teaching practices.

Morgan M. Jobe is a program coordinator in the College of Education at Kansas State University, where she also earned a bachelor’s degree in secondary education and a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. Morgan taught high school English-Language Arts for ten years in two different Kansas school districts before returning to Kansas State University as a staff member. Her research interests include diversity and equity issues in public education, as well as action research in teacher education programs.

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“100 Questions (and Answers) About Action Research provides a resource for professionals that want to learn and engage in action research. The question format helps a reader focus in on what information is going to be the most helpful and relevant to their topic.” 

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• The succinct and clear layperson’s language makes the information far easier to digest than traditional texts and increases access to important and complex action research concepts.
• In lieu of overwhelming citations within the text, an appendix is provided with books and articles worth pursuing.

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Research Topics & Ideas: Education

170+ Research Ideas To Fast-Track Your Project

If you’re just starting out exploring education-related topics for your dissertation, thesis or research project, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we’ll help kickstart your research topic ideation process by providing a hearty list of research topics and ideas , including examples from actual dissertations and theses..

PS – This is just the start…

We know it’s exciting to run through a list of research topics, but please keep in mind that this list is just a starting point . To develop a suitable education-related research topic, you’ll need to identify a clear and convincing research gap , and a viable plan of action to fill that gap.

If this sounds foreign to you, check out our free research topic webinar that explores how to find and refine a high-quality research topic, from scratch. Alternatively, if you’d like hands-on help, consider our 1-on-1 coaching service .

Overview: Education Research Topics

• How to find a research topic (video)
• List of 50+ education-related research topics/ideas
• List of 120+ level-specific research topics 
• Examples of actual dissertation topics in education
• Tips to fast-track your topic ideation (video)
• Free Webinar : Topic Ideation 101
• Where to get extra help

Education-Related Research Topics & Ideas

Below you’ll find a list of education-related research topics and idea kickstarters. These are fairly broad and flexible to various contexts, so keep in mind that you will need to refine them a little. Nevertheless, they should inspire some ideas for your project.

• The impact of school funding on student achievement
• The effects of social and emotional learning on student well-being
• The effects of parental involvement on student behaviour
• The impact of teacher training on student learning
• The impact of classroom design on student learning
• The impact of poverty on education
• The use of student data to inform instruction
• The role of parental involvement in education
• The effects of mindfulness practices in the classroom
• The use of technology in the classroom
• The role of critical thinking in education
• The use of formative and summative assessments in the classroom
• The use of differentiated instruction in the classroom
• The use of gamification in education
• The effects of teacher burnout on student learning
• The impact of school leadership on student achievement
• The effects of teacher diversity on student outcomes
• The role of teacher collaboration in improving student outcomes
• The implementation of blended and online learning
• The effects of teacher accountability on student achievement
• The effects of standardized testing on student learning
• The effects of classroom management on student behaviour
• The effects of school culture on student achievement
• The use of student-centred learning in the classroom
• The impact of teacher-student relationships on student outcomes
• The achievement gap in minority and low-income students
• The use of culturally responsive teaching in the classroom
• The impact of teacher professional development on student learning
• The use of project-based learning in the classroom
• The effects of teacher expectations on student achievement
• The use of adaptive learning technology in the classroom
• The impact of teacher turnover on student learning
• The effects of teacher recruitment and retention on student learning
• The impact of early childhood education on later academic success
• The impact of parental involvement on student engagement
• The use of positive reinforcement in education
• The impact of school climate on student engagement
• The role of STEM education in preparing students for the workforce
• The effects of school choice on student achievement
• The use of technology in the form of online tutoring

Level-Specific Research Topics

Looking for research topics for a specific level of education? We’ve got you covered. Below you can find research topic ideas for primary, secondary and tertiary-level education contexts. Click the relevant level to view the respective list.

Research Topics: Pick An Education Level

Primary education.

• Investigating the effects of peer tutoring on academic achievement in primary school
• Exploring the benefits of mindfulness practices in primary school classrooms
• Examining the effects of different teaching strategies on primary school students’ problem-solving skills
• The use of storytelling as a teaching strategy in primary school literacy instruction
• The role of cultural diversity in promoting tolerance and understanding in primary schools
• The impact of character education programs on moral development in primary school students
• Investigating the use of technology in enhancing primary school mathematics education
• The impact of inclusive curriculum on promoting equity and diversity in primary schools
• The impact of outdoor education programs on environmental awareness in primary school students
• The influence of school climate on student motivation and engagement in primary schools
• Investigating the effects of early literacy interventions on reading comprehension in primary school students
• The impact of parental involvement in school decision-making processes on student achievement in primary schools
• Exploring the benefits of inclusive education for students with special needs in primary schools
• Investigating the effects of teacher-student feedback on academic motivation in primary schools
• The role of technology in developing digital literacy skills in primary school students
• Effective strategies for fostering a growth mindset in primary school students
• Investigating the role of parental support in reducing academic stress in primary school children
• The role of arts education in fostering creativity and self-expression in primary school students
• Examining the effects of early childhood education programs on primary school readiness
• Examining the effects of homework on primary school students’ academic performance
• The role of formative assessment in improving learning outcomes in primary school classrooms
• The impact of teacher-student relationships on academic outcomes in primary school
• Investigating the effects of classroom environment on student behavior and learning outcomes in primary schools
• Investigating the role of creativity and imagination in primary school curriculum
• The impact of nutrition and healthy eating programs on academic performance in primary schools
• The impact of social-emotional learning programs on primary school students’ well-being and academic performance
• The role of parental involvement in academic achievement of primary school children
• Examining the effects of classroom management strategies on student behavior in primary school
• The role of school leadership in creating a positive school climate Exploring the benefits of bilingual education in primary schools
• The effectiveness of project-based learning in developing critical thinking skills in primary school students
• The role of inquiry-based learning in fostering curiosity and critical thinking in primary school students
• The effects of class size on student engagement and achievement in primary schools
• Investigating the effects of recess and physical activity breaks on attention and learning in primary school
• Exploring the benefits of outdoor play in developing gross motor skills in primary school children
• The effects of educational field trips on knowledge retention in primary school students
• Examining the effects of inclusive classroom practices on students’ attitudes towards diversity in primary schools
• The impact of parental involvement in homework on primary school students’ academic achievement
• Investigating the effectiveness of different assessment methods in primary school classrooms
• The influence of physical activity and exercise on cognitive development in primary school children
• Exploring the benefits of cooperative learning in promoting social skills in primary school students

Secondary Education

• Investigating the effects of school discipline policies on student behavior and academic success in secondary education
• The role of social media in enhancing communication and collaboration among secondary school students
• The impact of school leadership on teacher effectiveness and student outcomes in secondary schools
• Investigating the effects of technology integration on teaching and learning in secondary education
• Exploring the benefits of interdisciplinary instruction in promoting critical thinking skills in secondary schools
• The impact of arts education on creativity and self-expression in secondary school students
• The effectiveness of flipped classrooms in promoting student learning in secondary education
• The role of career guidance programs in preparing secondary school students for future employment
• Investigating the effects of student-centered learning approaches on student autonomy and academic success in secondary schools
• The impact of socio-economic factors on educational attainment in secondary education
• Investigating the impact of project-based learning on student engagement and academic achievement in secondary schools
• Investigating the effects of multicultural education on cultural understanding and tolerance in secondary schools
• The influence of standardized testing on teaching practices and student learning in secondary education
• Investigating the effects of classroom management strategies on student behavior and academic engagement in secondary education
• The influence of teacher professional development on instructional practices and student outcomes in secondary schools
• The role of extracurricular activities in promoting holistic development and well-roundedness in secondary school students
• Investigating the effects of blended learning models on student engagement and achievement in secondary education
• The role of physical education in promoting physical health and well-being among secondary school students
• Investigating the effects of gender on academic achievement and career aspirations in secondary education
• Exploring the benefits of multicultural literature in promoting cultural awareness and empathy among secondary school students
• The impact of school counseling services on student mental health and well-being in secondary schools
• Exploring the benefits of vocational education and training in preparing secondary school students for the workforce
• The role of digital literacy in preparing secondary school students for the digital age
• The influence of parental involvement on academic success and well-being of secondary school students
• The impact of social-emotional learning programs on secondary school students’ well-being and academic success
• The role of character education in fostering ethical and responsible behavior in secondary school students
• Examining the effects of digital citizenship education on responsible and ethical technology use among secondary school students
• The impact of parental involvement in school decision-making processes on student outcomes in secondary schools
• The role of educational technology in promoting personalized learning experiences in secondary schools
• The impact of inclusive education on the social and academic outcomes of students with disabilities in secondary schools
• The influence of parental support on academic motivation and achievement in secondary education
• The role of school climate in promoting positive behavior and well-being among secondary school students
• Examining the effects of peer mentoring programs on academic achievement and social-emotional development in secondary schools
• Examining the effects of teacher-student relationships on student motivation and achievement in secondary schools
• Exploring the benefits of service-learning programs in promoting civic engagement among secondary school students
• The impact of educational policies on educational equity and access in secondary education
• Examining the effects of homework on academic achievement and student well-being in secondary education
• Investigating the effects of different assessment methods on student performance in secondary schools
• Examining the effects of single-sex education on academic performance and gender stereotypes in secondary schools
• The role of mentoring programs in supporting the transition from secondary to post-secondary education

Tertiary Education

• The role of student support services in promoting academic success and well-being in higher education
• The impact of internationalization initiatives on students’ intercultural competence and global perspectives in tertiary education
• Investigating the effects of active learning classrooms and learning spaces on student engagement and learning outcomes in tertiary education
• Exploring the benefits of service-learning experiences in fostering civic engagement and social responsibility in higher education
• The influence of learning communities and collaborative learning environments on student academic and social integration in higher education
• Exploring the benefits of undergraduate research experiences in fostering critical thinking and scientific inquiry skills
• Investigating the effects of academic advising and mentoring on student retention and degree completion in higher education
• The role of student engagement and involvement in co-curricular activities on holistic student development in higher education
• The impact of multicultural education on fostering cultural competence and diversity appreciation in higher education
• The role of internships and work-integrated learning experiences in enhancing students’ employability and career outcomes
• Examining the effects of assessment and feedback practices on student learning and academic achievement in tertiary education
• The influence of faculty professional development on instructional practices and student outcomes in tertiary education
• The influence of faculty-student relationships on student success and well-being in tertiary education
• The impact of college transition programs on students’ academic and social adjustment to higher education
• The impact of online learning platforms on student learning outcomes in higher education
• The impact of financial aid and scholarships on access and persistence in higher education
• The influence of student leadership and involvement in extracurricular activities on personal development and campus engagement
• Exploring the benefits of competency-based education in developing job-specific skills in tertiary students
• Examining the effects of flipped classroom models on student learning and retention in higher education
• Exploring the benefits of online collaboration and virtual team projects in developing teamwork skills in tertiary students
• Investigating the effects of diversity and inclusion initiatives on campus climate and student experiences in tertiary education
• The influence of study abroad programs on intercultural competence and global perspectives of college students
• Investigating the effects of peer mentoring and tutoring programs on student retention and academic performance in tertiary education
• Investigating the effectiveness of active learning strategies in promoting student engagement and achievement in tertiary education
• Investigating the effects of blended learning models and hybrid courses on student learning and satisfaction in higher education
• The role of digital literacy and information literacy skills in supporting student success in the digital age
• Investigating the effects of experiential learning opportunities on career readiness and employability of college students
• The impact of e-portfolios on student reflection, self-assessment, and showcasing of learning in higher education
• The role of technology in enhancing collaborative learning experiences in tertiary classrooms
• The impact of research opportunities on undergraduate student engagement and pursuit of advanced degrees
• Examining the effects of competency-based assessment on measuring student learning and achievement in tertiary education
• Examining the effects of interdisciplinary programs and courses on critical thinking and problem-solving skills in college students
• The role of inclusive education and accessibility in promoting equitable learning experiences for diverse student populations
• The role of career counseling and guidance in supporting students’ career decision-making in tertiary education
• The influence of faculty diversity and representation on student success and inclusive learning environments in higher education

Education-Related Dissertations & Theses

While the ideas we’ve presented above are a decent starting point for finding a research topic in education, they are fairly generic and non-specific. So, it helps to look at actual dissertations and theses in the education space to see how this all comes together in practice.

Below, we’ve included a selection of education-related research projects to help refine your thinking. These are actual dissertations and theses, written as part of Master’s and PhD-level programs, so they can provide some useful insight as to what a research topic looks like in practice.

• From Rural to Urban: Education Conditions of Migrant Children in China (Wang, 2019)
• Energy Renovation While Learning English: A Guidebook for Elementary ESL Teachers (Yang, 2019)
• A Reanalyses of Intercorrelational Matrices of Visual and Verbal Learners’ Abilities, Cognitive Styles, and Learning Preferences (Fox, 2020)
• A study of the elementary math program utilized by a mid-Missouri school district (Barabas, 2020)
• Instructor formative assessment practices in virtual learning environments : a posthumanist sociomaterial perspective (Burcks, 2019)
• Higher education students services: a qualitative study of two mid-size universities’ direct exchange programs (Kinde, 2020)
• Exploring editorial leadership : a qualitative study of scholastic journalism advisers teaching leadership in Missouri secondary schools (Lewis, 2020)
• Selling the virtual university: a multimodal discourse analysis of marketing for online learning (Ludwig, 2020)
• Advocacy and accountability in school counselling: assessing the use of data as related to professional self-efficacy (Matthews, 2020)
• The use of an application screening assessment as a predictor of teaching retention at a midwestern, K-12, public school district (Scarbrough, 2020)
• Core values driving sustained elite performance cultures (Beiner, 2020)
• Educative features of upper elementary Eureka math curriculum (Dwiggins, 2020)
• How female principals nurture adult learning opportunities in successful high schools with challenging student demographics (Woodward, 2020)
• The disproportionality of Black Males in Special Education: A Case Study Analysis of Educator Perceptions in a Southeastern Urban High School (McCrae, 2021)

As you can see, these research topics are a lot more focused than the generic topic ideas we presented earlier. So, in order for you to develop a high-quality research topic, you’ll need to get specific and laser-focused on a specific context with specific variables of interest.  In the video below, we explore some other important things you’ll need to consider when crafting your research topic.

Get 1-On-1 Help

If you’re still unsure about how to find a quality research topic within education, check out our Research Topic Kickstarter service, which is the perfect starting point for developing a unique, well-justified research topic.

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Article contents

Participatory action research in education.

• Anne Galletta Anne Galletta Cleveland State University
•  and  María Elena Torre María Elena Torre Graduate Center, City University of New York
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.557
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Participatory action research (PAR) is an epistemological framework rooted in critiques of knowledge production made by feminist and critical race theory that challenge exclusive academic notions of what counts as knowledge. PAR legitimizes and prioritizes the expertise and perspectives that come from lived experience and situated knowledge, particularly among those that have been historically marginalized. In education research, a PAR approach typically centers the wisdom and experience of students (or school-age youth) and educators, positioning them as architects of research rather than objects of study. This form of participatory inquiry and collective action serves as a countercurrent in schools, where democratic inquiry and meaning making contradicts the top-down knowledge transmission practices bounded by prescribed curriculum and high-stakes standardized assessments. Like all scholars, those engaged in PAR contend with questions regarding standards of scientific practice and what counts as evidence even as they co-generate knowledge and solidarity with communities in which they may be members or allies that are outside the academy.

PAR projects frequently emerge from a critique of dehumanizing structural arrangements and alienating, often pathologizing, cultural discourses. These critiques spark a desire for research that questions these arrangements and discourses, documenting and engaging critical interpretive perspectives, all with the hope of producing findings that will create cracks and fissures in the status quo and provoke transformational change. PAR builds inquiry in the spaces between what is and what could be, with the assumption that dissonance and/or clashes of meaning with ruptures are generative in the possibility for reframing social problems and reconfiguring human relations. When discordance within the research collective, or between the collective and the outside world, is engaged rather than denied or smoothed over, new and different ways of seeing and being emerge. More than simply a method, critical PAR reflects a philosophical understanding of knowledge as socially produced through history and power, an epistemology that recognizes the liberatory impulse of critique and its potential for transformation. PAR projects privilege standpoints that have been traditionally excluded and excavate operations of power within the research in order to inform analytical lenses necessary to understanding dynamics within the issues and experiences being studied.

Examining the potential of PAR in education requires particular attention to the context of what children and youth encounter on a daily basis. Schools have been and continue to be spaces of struggle and contestation for students, in terms of learning and development, mental health and well-being, and physical safety. Federal policies have hollowed out protections for the most marginalized students, particularly youth of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth; and immigrant and undocumented youth. The rampant privatization of public education, narrowing of public governance, and the deceptive branding of corporate reform as “equity” is sobering. PAR in education troubles this very context, offering a research praxis of countervailing power, agitation, and generative ways of knowing, and being in relation. This encyclopedic entry details the ways in which participatory spaces bring people together, through inquiry, across a continuum of privilege and vulnerability to make meaning of the conditions under which we are living, with each other, for our collective liberation.

• participatory action research
• education reform
• participatory contact zones
• generative dissonance

Introduction

Participatory action research (PAR) is an epistemological framework that reconfigures ways of knowing and being in relation—it marks an ontological shift from conventional research practices within the academy. Rooted in critiques of knowledge production made by feminist and critical race theory, PAR challenges exclusive academic notions of expertise, legitimizing, and prioritizing the expertise and perspectives that come from lived experience and situated knowledge, particularly those that have been historically marginalized (Collins, 1998 ; Harding, 1991 ). In education research, a PAR approach typically centers the wisdom and experience of students (or school-age youth) and educators, positioning them as architects of research rather than objects of study (Torre & Fine, 2006 ). Youth and educators are invited as colleagues to design research programs, determine research questions, gather and make sense of relevant literatures/existing knowledge, decide useful methods, collect and analyze data, and create meaningful research products. PAR may draw from a qualitative research approach or it may include quantitative research within a mixed methods approach.

While PAR does not need the participation of the academy, it is often constructed as a collaboration between university-based researchers and youth and sometimes adults outside of the university who are concerned about injustice in a number of public spheres. Together, these research collectives of differently positioned members across institutional and social hierarchies of power—of youth, academics, and, sometimes, elders, educators, artists, lawyers, and policymakers, for example—create what María (Torre, 2009 ) has called “participatory contact zones.” Each member/co-researcher brings her/his/their own reservoir of experiential knowledge and differing angles of vision to the table, into a participatory inquiry space committed to using and infusing these differences throughout the research process. A deeply relational praxis, PAR understands the diverse range of standpoints, and the potential dissonance and/or clashes that come with them, as an important and generative contribution to the research. When discordance within the research collective, or between the collective and the outside world, is engaged rather than denied or smoothed over, new and different ways of seeing and being emerge. For these reasons, PAR engages power and difference as part of an ethical and methodological stance within research. 1

To lay the groundwork for a discussion of the complexities of carrying out PAR projects in and around educational spaces, we begin by establishing some of the contemporary tensions within public education. We then introduce a project with the hope of illustrating some core theoretical, methodological, and ethical commitments of a critical PAR praxis, paying particular attention to the relational and structural dimensions of PAR as well as generative possibilities opened by PAR’s embrace of discontinuities and dissonance. At the heart of what we hope readers will take away from this article is an understanding of participation in PAR as an inherently ethical commitment to redistribute power and legitimacy. This commitment is complexly woven throughout all steps of the research process. In education, like many institutions, decentering privilege and questioning power threatens existing structural arrangements and is often met with hostility by those historically in control. While these challenges tear at the institutional fabric of what has been , the conflicts generated by participation have the potential to create openings and “break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real” (Greene, 1995 , p. 19) and thus reframe research questions, introduce alternative interpretations, and reposition relations of power toward what could be .

In the next section, we outline the theoretical genealogy of PAR and consider philosophical underpinnings of critical participatory methodologies.

Theoretical Genealogy of PAR

The origins of critical PAR developed in the disciplinary margins of social psychology, education, and sociology. Many of its roots can be traced to community settings and contexts where academics, organizers, and residents gathered to address community problems and political oppression (Fals-Borda, 1977 ; Lewin, 1948 ; Rahman, 1985 ; Wormser & Selltiz, 1951 ). Social psychologist Kurt Lewin, Claire Selltiz, and Margot Wormser stretched the methodologies of their discipline in the 1940s and early 1950s, adapting and developing a practice of action research for problem-solving on issues of racial and ethnic discrimination in the aftermath of World War II (Cherry & Borshuk, 1998 ; Torre & Fine, 2011 ). Lewin ( 1948 ) argued for an action research methodology maintaining a “constant intense tension,” where one “keep[s] both theory and reality fully within his field of vision” (p. 10). Fals-Borda and Rhaman ( 1991 ) describe the use of PAR in Bangladesh, Columbia, India, Nicaragua, Peru, Sri Lanka, the United States, and Zimbabwe where a number of academics in the late 1970s and early 1980s left positions within the university to engage in participatory community research. Some later returned to the academy, committed to the bumpy task of inserting PAR methodologies within rigid disciplinary views of science. This involved altering conventional conceptions of science, challenging the academy’s exclusive hold on “expertise,” and expanding notions of who can legitimately produce knowledge to those outside universities. This shift in power toward collective community efforts investigating human problems signified a recognition of the deep reservoirs of cultural knowledge and local expertise within communities confronting these problems. Further, the emphasis on the urgency of community inquiry in turn deemed action to be an integral part of knowledge production. The commitment to action insisted on a praxis research aimed at disrupting relations of oppression. Embracing Marx’s call to move from interpretation to transformation (Engels, 1886/1946 ), an epistemology emerged around the globe that braided knowledge production, struggles for justice, and participation of the people.

More Than a “Method”

Central to a critical praxis of PAR is a framework that reconfigures relational, structural, and cultural arrangements of power in order to collectively alter ways of thinking about conditions of lived experience. Embodying the spirit of Gramsci (Hoare & Smith, 1971/2000 ), it involves a research process in which social givens are upended, “common sense” is critiqued (p. 637), and the “spontaneous’ consent” by which we participate in everyday structures of oppression is surfaced and troubled (p. 145). More than simply a method, critical PAR reflects a philosophical understanding of knowledge as socially produced through history and power, an epistemology that recognizes the liberatory impulse of critique and its potential for transformation. Projects privilege standpoints that have been traditionally excluded and excavates operations of power within the research in order to inform analytical lenses necessary to understanding dynamics within the issues and experiences being studied. As Morrow and Torres ( 1995 ) note, the experience of privilege and exclusion, sometimes veiled, “is never fully secured, remains precarious, and must be continually negotiated” (p. 278), providing potential for counterhegemony and resistance. In this sense, a PAR approach is both a “rigorous search for knowledge” and what Fals-Borda called a “ vivencia ,” a “progressive evolution toward an overall, structural transformation of society and culture, a process that requires ever renewed commitment, an ethical stand, self-critique and persistence at all levels” (Rahman & Fals-Borda, 1991 , p. 29).

Critical collective participatory methodologies create ways to explore inconsistencies between the external reality of those marginalized by poverty and the consciousness through which the reality is understood. Paulo Freire’s work in Brazil in the 1950s before his incarceration powerfully illustrates the link between the struggle for emancipatory knowledge and the constraints of social reproductive forces in education. He argued for a pedagogical praxis that was “forged with , not for , the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity” (Freire, 1970/2016 , p. 48). For Freire, key to the struggle for liberation was a movement toward awareness. Within PAR, researchers committed to justice “must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform” (p. 49). Freire critiqued education as typically reliant on cultural transmission of knowledge that is widely privileged and credentialized, which he referred to as the “banking theory and practice” which “fail[s] to acknowledge men and women as historical beings” (p. 84).

The work of Lewin, Wormser and Selltiz, Fals-Borda, Rahman, Freire, and others around the globe has continued to inform generations of PAR driven by emancipatory struggle (Zeller-Berkman, 2014 ). Challenging the idea that expertise exists solely within the academy or professions, community leaders of color in the urban United States, alongside interracial solidarity collectives and indigenous peoples from rural and urban communities, have brought their local knowledge and practices to the research table, along with a multiplicity of skills and understandings to new knowledge and alternatives to oppressive structural arrangements (Ayala et al., 2018 ; Cahill et al., 2017 ; Galletta, 2019 ; Smith, 2012 ; Torre et al., 2017 ).

We turn now to a discussion of PAR specifically within the realm of education with the hope of marking important ideas, tensions, and ethical considerations. Our discussion should not be understood as exhaustive since the body of participatory research in education is rich with variation. We should note that the context from which we write is primarily, though not exclusively, within the United States.

Historicizing the Context of Education

It feels impossible to begin a discussion of PAR in education without reflecting first on the ideological, epistemological, geopolitical, and racialized geographies within contemporary philosophical and political trends in PK–12 public education. What does it mean to engage students, teachers, and school communities in a transformative process of democratic inquiry and meaning-making when such communities have been placed in the straightjackets of high-stakes testing and neoliberal restructuring? A second important reflection must attend to the field of educational research itself and the ways the academy has historically privileged and valued particular ways of knowing over others. What then does it mean to engage in open-ended mixed method research in which untraditionally trained researchers determine questions, design methods, and analyze and interpret data? In the following section, we open each of these areas and encourage readers to think about the challenges and tensions these realities produce for a sincere engagement with PAR in education.

Philosophical and Political Trends in Public Education

Deeply constrained by the parameters of individual economic mobility and the neoliberal press for dominance within a global competitive market, the current context of education philosophically and politically is engaged in the transmission of knowledge through standardized curriculum and high-stakes testing. Furthermore, the obligation to facilitate the learning and well-being of children and youth stems from a narrow commitment to investment conditioned on the rate of return for the degree of resources invested. In the late 1980s and 1990s, as school districts were released from desegregation rulings, the move toward resegregation took hold, with increased isolation of poor and working-class students of color and immigrant students. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, and again in 2015 , federal policy reconceptualized equity. The movement toward atomized standards and measures of achievement and quality in education through state testing, most evident in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, shifted the equation from input to output equity (Rebell & Wolff, 2008 ) absent scrutiny on gaps in opportunity, capacity, and access to resources. The current moment in education could be described as being under the tyranny of “new managerialism” characterized by a drive for “evidence-based practice” (Davies, 2003 ) with substantial imposition of philanthropic directives and business interests tied to funding (Ball & Junemann, 2012 ; Giridharadas, 2018 ).

Given these political and policy trends, the landscape of public education is saturated in a discourse and materiality reflecting an audit culture of high-stakes standardized testing (Koretz, 2017 ) and corporate education reform (Au & Ferrare, 2015 ; Fabricant & Fine, 2012 ; Lipman, 2004 ). Educational reform in the United States is argued as opportunity through race- and class-neutral individualized school choices that has as its consequence the furthering of the racialization and economic isolation of children and youth in schools “branded” by particular curriculum and outreach to families (Cucchiara, 2013 ; Kimelberg, 2014 ; Lareau, 2014 ; Pattillo, Delale-O’Connor, & Butts, 2014 ; Posey-Maddox, 2014 ). Within education and the connective tissue of the health, legal protection, and criminal justice systems, there is ongoing dispossession of public assets and the accumulation of those assets by private entities (Fine & Ruglis, 2009 ; Harvey, 2004 ; Lipman, 2016 ).

As a result, in terms of learning and development, mental health and well-being, and physical safety, schools have been and continue to be spaces of struggle and contestation for students. This has been evidenced most recently by federal policies that have hollowed out protections for the most marginalized students, particularly youth of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth; and immigrant and undocumented youth. In 2018 , the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice withdrew support for legal guidance discouraging schools from suspending and expelling students (Lhamon & Gupta, 2014 ). The Department of Justice and Department of Education also withdrew the 2016 legal guidance that schools treat students consistent with their gender identity (Lhamon & Gupta, 2016 ). And, most recently in 2018 , a White House memo expressed the intention to deny the existence of transgender people. This withdrawal of federal policy support and recognition has double impact for LGBTQ students, who report disproportionately high levels of in-school and out-of-school suspensions (Kosciw, Greytak, Zongrone, Clark, & Truong, 2017 , p. 48). Piled on to these shifts away from protecting youth in schools are the recent attacks on young people migrating to the United States and immigrant youth with long-term residency.

These daily lived conditions shape the contours within which PAR unfolds and challenges, raising critical considerations for a research praxis that ignites and supports the full participation and direction from youth who are structurally dispossessed and speaking out within spaces of intersecting lines of resistance.

Privileging What Has Historically “Counted” as Knowledge and the Policing of Such Matters

In addition to conditions on the ground inside PK–12 education, the horizon for educational research has lost considerable capacity for imagining many ways of inquiring into, interpreting, and altering the conditions of human experience in public education. As feminist and critical theorist Patti Lather ( 2004 ) observes about the role of the National Research Council and its 2002 report, Scientific Research in Education : “In spite of its oft-repeated intentions of balance across multiple methods, objectivity is enshrined and prediction, explanation, and verification override description, interpretation, and discovery” (p. 762). With the legislation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the articulation of criteria for quality research includes four tiers of research standards that define the degree to which educational research is rigorous and replicable. A Foucauldian act of surveillance and control, these tiers of research frame the standardization process, with each tier involving some form of experimental or correlational design, statistical analyses, or measures of significance. The justification for these standards is the assumption that a “high-quality research finding . . . is likely to improve student outcomes or other relevant outcomes” (Every Student Succeeds Act, 8101[21]).

Given this context, critical PAR is an inherently transgressive approach in its attention to power, its privileging of the lived experiences of the most marginalized, its use of problem posing and grounded participatory methodologies, and its commitments to produce knowledge useful for political activism and community mobilization against structures of exclusion and alienation (Cahill, Rios-Moore, & Threatts, 2008 ; Caraballo, Lozenski, Lyiscott, & Morrell, 2017 ; Drame & Irby, 2016 ; Guishard, 2009 ; jones, Stewart, Galletta, & Ayala, 2015 ; Otero & Cammerota, 2011 ; Torre et al., 2008 ; Tuck et al., 2008 ; Wright, 2015 ).

PAR in Education: Predictable Tensions

Some might argue that there is an elephant in the room when one is engaged with PAR projects that take place in schools. Not all participatory research in education is located within schools, but, when it is, predictable tensions often arise. While there are ongoing struggles to reimagine education, formal educational spaces can be alienating hierarchical places where relationships between youth and adults are rigid and not rooted in equality (Irizarry & Brown, 2014 ). Students are generally positioned as receivers of knowledge who are expected to follow directions; they are rarely included in decision-making about policies and cultural practices that shape their experiences, and they often face disciplinary outcomes if they do not do as they are told. In contrast, PAR spaces are built around methodologies that encourage open-ended inquiry, assume that knowledge is co-constructed, challenge conventional power relationships, and aim to disrupt and transform oppressive conditions.

As a result of these tensions, critical PAR projects—projects that consciously incorporate feminist, critical race, decolonial, and neo-Marxist frameworks—make strategic decisions about when and how to study issues in education from within schools and when to instead operate from outside, in community organizations, recreation centers, libraries, and the streets. However, as we discuss in more depth later, regardless of research settings issues of power exist and must be negotiated. When participatory methodologies are uncritically employed, they, like any methodology, can reproduce “the very forms of oppression that participatory approaches seek to disrupt” (Drame & Irby, 2016 , p. 3). All research is vulnerable to gendered and racialized social relations (among others) that appear so natural and inevitable that their toxicity is left undetected (Hall, 1993 ). Critical PAR addresses this by engaging in ongoing questions of privilege and vulnerability throughout the research process, reflecting the theory and history of the origins of PAR.

Participatory Methodologies in the Life of a PAR Project

We work as faculty in public universities, active in formal and informal educational settings, in both classrooms and communities, with a commitment to envisioning the academy as an inclusive public space for inquiry and social action. Anne collaborates with youth, educators, and community leaders in efforts to inquire about and take action toward more equitable relations and structural arrangements in education. María spends much of her time running the Public Science Project, which brings together intergenerational and interracial collectives of academics, organizers, advocates, artists, lawyers, and policymakers to engage participatory research in the interest of transforming unjust conditions. In the next section, we draw from moments within the life of a PAR project in Cleveland, Ohio, called Lives in Transition, to illustrate a set of theoretical, methodological, and ethical characteristics and considerations when engaging PAR in education.

Lives in Transition: Constructing Knowledge and Formulating Critique on the Meaning of School Closure

As was the case in Chicago, Denver, New York City, Philadelphia, and many other urban school districts across the United States, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) responded to federal accountability policy and state and local school reform initiatives by closing schools in some of the poorest neighborhoods on the city’s east side, where many African American families live. The consequences of these decisions impacted the lives of youth, families, and communities for whom these schools were a part. A collective of approximately 10 high school youth, several teachers, and graduate students and faculty from Cleveland State University came together to document the historical moment and understand the meaning of these school closures for youth and interrogate the discourse of “transformation” by the district. The research collective met regularly from 2010 through 2011 . The origins of this project reflect a common characteristic of PAR beginnings, as noted in our first core dimension of PAR.

Organic and Collective Beginnings

The origins of PAR projects are often organic and collective in nature, responses to realities of groups encountering unfair or unjust historical moments. In the case of the project discussed here, the announcement that the district was going to close schools that had not met state “standards of achievement,” among other measures, interrupted the life of students in Edison High School, a school where Anne and visual artist and PAR researcher vanessa jones were working on a storytelling project. 2 The focus of their project with students in the school at that time was the nature of transitions in the lives of young people. In the midst of narrating significant turning points of their lives through spoken word, art, and music, the participating students encountered a new life transition—as the closure of their high school was impossible to ignore.

Anne, vanessa, and their youth co-researchers faced a critical situation. The storytelling project had created a space where close relationships developed amid both a nurturing and hostile school climate. On the one hand, there were classrooms where teachers understood the brilliance and struggles of their students; on the other, students had to enter the school each day through “weapon detectors” and were subjected to the use of “lockdowns” to empty the hallways. Students facing the closing of their school were filled with uncertainty, anger, and apprehension—affect and reactions that felt in stark contrast to the reform narratives being used by the local district and the federal education policy to justify the closings through the argument that school closure was a “necessary intervention” to save students from “failing” schools. The sharp difference between the “reform” discourse and student experiences signaled the need for inquiry. Ethically, it pointed to a glaring absence. Where was the expertise—the voices, experiences, and ideas—of youth and teachers attending and working inside the schools targeted for closure?

In the year that followed, students displaced by school closures and those in receiving schools were forced to navigate new spaces and relationships. Anne and vanessa decided to collaborate with teachers and graduate students to offer a space for critical PAR in an after-school program in two of the high schools receiving students displaced by school closure. In keeping with the theme of transitions, the project was named Lives in Transition, or LiT.

Recognizing Expertise Beyond the Academy

PAR is guided by experiential knowledge and recognizes the legitimacy of those outside the academy to problem-pose and conduct research about issues impacting their lives. The expertise youth brought to the LiT project was essential to documenting the experience of school closure as they were living it in the present. They wrote poetry, drew maps of their neighborhoods and bus routes, and filmed the processes of the research collective’s engagement in forms of problem-posing. Anne and vanessa brought data sources providing a broader context to the meetings, such as district reports on the criteria used for closures, newspaper clippings on how the district justified its closure decisions, documents on district and state educational policies on school transportation and the use of closed school facilities, as well as historical accounts related to neighborhoods affected by the closures. They invited guests to meetings, who brought specific information needed to complete the inquiry. Critical PAR often draws on the expertise of intergenerational collectives, wherein differentially positioned members carry varied (though sometimes overlapping) funds of knowledge. The validity of the research is strengthened by this breadth of expertise—in this case, the youth knowledge about their communities and schools as well as the adult knowledge of the law, history, or data from particular fields.

In this manner, being on the “inside” of an issue or experience brings an angle of vision likely to afford understanding of the nuances and complexity of the problem being studied. Those positioned outside the community or the study focus may raise questions that reveal gaps in understanding or investment in outsider perspectives. For example, vanessa proposed involving students in the PAR project to the administration at one of the schools receiving students displaced by school closure. The school administration declined extending an invitation to their students to participate, noting that students’ participation in PAR on the experience of school closure might “bring the pain up again” (jones, Stewart, Galletta, & Ayala, 2015 ). While the production of knowledge of those closest to the problem studied offers potential for constructing new knowledge, as indicated here it also may pose a threat to maintaining ways of knowing and being in relation that support the status quo. Alternative angles of vision offered by the youth experiencing school closure may have produced knowledge potentially disruptive to the established logic of the district’s educational policies. In this example, the transgressive nature of PAR is evident, as is the centering of the experience of youth within the construction of knowledge and the repositioning of relationships.

Discontinuities as Potential Reframing Analysis and Repositioning Relationships

PAR is attentive to discontinuities in ways of seeing a problem and the power relations at work within conflicting frames for analyzing a problem. While dissonance and disagreement can be productive to research, they are not always easy. We experienced a moment of conflict for the LiT project where youth researchers were speaking about the varying identities students possessed, which differed depending on whether they were displaced by school closure and sent to a receiving school or were in the receiving school, impacted by the presence of new students transferring in from closed schools. The conversation took place at a research meeting at Granite Hill, a high school that received students from Edison High after Edison was closed. Students and teachers were each arguing from standpoints that held deep knowledge of the experience of dislocation but with different perspectives. The conflict surfaced the reality that students from closed high schools held strong ties to their old schools, and this was reflected in their reluctance to associate themselves with the new school to which they had been transferred. It also underscored for the research collective the importance of place, socially, historically, and geographically for students and school communities, as the school closings involved relocating students across geographic and community boundaries to new schools that often had long-standing rivalries and other competitive relationships with their old (now closed) schools.

Three teachers participated in the LiT PAR collective the year after a number of schools were closed. The teachers, all African American, were recognized as strong student advocates with shared cultural connections with the youth researchers. At the same time each represented different vantage points and varying degrees of structural constraints (Kohfeldt, Chhun, Grace, & Langhout, 2011 ; Ozer, Ritterman, & Wanis, 2010 ). Students knew Ms. Drew and Ms. Turney to be teachers who responded quickly to student challenges, provided rides home when bus fare was unavailable, and supported students when families encountered health crises. The third teacher, Sergeant Goodman, directed the JROTC program. Anne and vanessa had met him through two students who joined JROTC when they arrived at Granite Hill High School, after being transferred from their closed school. He asked to join the project, and though Anne and vanessa shared a broader critique of the presence of JROTC inside poor and working-class urban and rural schools but absent from wealthier suburban schools, they recognized his relationships with the students and his desire to support the project. His presence added to diverse perspectives among the adults who were insiders to the school. vanessa was also an “insider” in many ways as her son attended Cleveland schools, and she shared common experiences of attending underresourced schools serving poor and working-class communities of color. As a member of the research collective she drew organically from these experiences as a student longing for greater “communication, expression, freedom, and forming social connections” in education (jones, 2012 , p. 193). Anne’s race and social class background positioned her at times as an “outsider,” even as her regular presence in classrooms and community meeting spaces offered meaningful relationships with students and teachers and provided exposure to intimate knowledge about what was happening inside the schools.

In this participatory contact zone of sameness and difference—within the research collective—LiT members inquired and engaged multiple positionalities, sparking lenses of analysis used in meaning-making, contestation, humor, and reflection throughout the research process. A student researcher who was displaced spoke about his feelings of loss and defended those who resisted, even resented, assimilation into their receiving school, Granite Hill High. Other youth researchers saw this as deeply problematic and even used the moment to lift the benefits of being a student at Granite Hill, boasting of its athletic prowess and superiority. In what first appeared to be playfulness within the group, there was evident a rub produced by the strong shared frustration over the policy of school closure that, while impacting each of them differently, was enforced on all of them without any control or authorizing on their part.

A youth researcher who had been at Granite Hill for several years responded critically toward displaced students who stayed loyal to their closed school. Frustration hung from the words shared, particularly by one of the teachers. In a discussion punctuated with references to teachers who did and did not help students learn, and resources the school did and did not possess, the statements became personal. Ms. Drew spoke in a raised, emotional tone in her response to a youth researcher’s observation that displaced students retained their former school’s affiliation:

What he’s saying is that, most people who consider themselves from Edison High, they were invested in their school. But if you . . . went to Edison, and you walked the hall all day then, and then your school closed, you have no right to complain. You didn’t go to class and that’s why the numbers went down , because you didn’t go to your class and that’s why Edison had to close. Because if you would have been in class then they would’ve had the numbers they needed.

This biting critique by a teacher, uncharacteristic of her reputation as a student advocate, revealed the abrasive and frequent presence of high-stakes measures as a reference point in the lives of teachers and students. These measures influenced school rankings and led to school closure, dressed up as school reform. Ms. Drew called on the assumptions of a policy context where “numbers” drove decisions that were decontextualized from the lives of youth, their families, and educators. As Ms. Drew continued she revealed her biography of struggling with displacement as a teacher. She noted her affection for her former school and its students. Along with students and other teachers, Ms. Drew had been transferred from Kensington High to Granite Hill just that year. The tension created by her passionate comments forced the research collective to acknowledge that the threat of school closure bleeds into the everyday life of all schools in the district including “receiving schools.”

Ms. Drew: I came from Kensington. I love Kensington . . . I’ve seen plenty of kids . . . that graduated . . . that’s my school. vanessa: So that was a part of the story— Sergeant Goodman: Their pain could be your pain. As easy as Edison High closed, Granite Hill could be next. Ms. Drew: That’s right. Sergeant Goodman: And truth be told Granite Hill is on that list.

We see in this strained moment the created space for problem-posing, in the Freirian sense, as LiT members actively engaged in working out together and naming their “reality” as students and teachers, reflecting on differing and similar experiences of youth and of teachers. In this way, the LiT members came closer to understanding themselves to be “in a situation,” as Freire might say, coming closer to “the very condition of existence” (Freire, 1970/2016 , p. 109). The clash of ideas and interpretations created deeply pedagogic moments relationally and conceptually. Through their own enactments, the very dynamics of what they were studying surfaced. At its best, PAR produces critically pedagogical spaces where tensions and dissonance spark learning for everyone in the collective , not just the youth or the adults, and new possibilities in knowing and being in relation can be imagined.

Situating Lived Experiences of Youth Within Broader Structural Conditions

Within PAR, critical inquiry and ethical praxis situates lived experiences of youth within broader structural conditions. What happens within the PAR collective often speaks to what is happening in the broader context, influencing what students and educators are experiencing within schools. Here LiT members were also engaged in a form of what Drame and Irby ( 2016 ) refer to as interpersonal reflexivity, which interrogates positionalities and the nature of relationships within and beyond us (see also Chiu, 2006 ; Nicholls, 2009 ). Collectively there is a role for reflexivity within critical PAR where as a group we might pause and examine what is happening within the PAR collective to understand how it may be influencing the conceptualization of a project, data collection, analysis of the data, and/or reporting back results. Interpersonal reflexivity involves deliberate attention to the contextual layers of analysis and relations of power operating within the research. As Cammarota and Fine ( 2008 ) write, knowledge gained from research “should be critical in nature, meaning that findings and insights derived from analyses should point to historic and contemporary moves of power and toward progressive changes improving social conditions within the situation studied” (p. 6).

In this manner, ethical considerations impacted analytical practice and reporting back strategies. It meant attending to a broader context within which LiT youth researchers, educators, and university faculty worked together. At the state level, legislation in 2012 had altered school funding policies to allow CMSD to share a portion of local funding with charter schools the district deemed high performing. State per-pupil funding followed students out of district schools and into charter schools as a result of provisions of No Child Left Behind, as one of several consequences for districts with underperforming schools. Also, federal funds flowed to states through legislation specifically supporting the establishment of charter schools. Schools faced closure, followed by the opening up of educational facilities once publicly owned to privatized entities through charter school start-ups and new theme-based district schools in partnership with industry and nonprofit organizations.

These broader structural conditions and their historical significance provided the interpretive material to document the “webs of power that connect institutional and individual lives to larger social formations” (Weis & Fine, 2004 , p. xxi). These considerations were evident in the creative product as LiT prepared to communicate findings to the public. In a performative sharing of pain associated with school closure and the power in reframing this policy as unjust, vanessa jones and Eric Schilling integrated the poetry, images, and narratives of LiT members and produced a film, Lives in Transition: Eviction Notice (jones & Schilling, 2011 ). The film reflected the creative work of the youth in naming their reality and using creative arts to convey the findings from the PAR project to “retrieve and correct official or elitist history and reinterpret it according to class interests” (Fals-Borda, 2001 , p. 30). The metaphor of eviction reflected the realities of the lives of the youth, experienced in residential mobility. Now, as a result of state and local intervention through school accountability policies, students experienced the imposition of a decision with profound relational and material consequences. This counterstory was conveyed in the film.

In the spirit of questioning, a core value and epistemic activity in critical interpretive perspectives, we can see that the beginnings of PAR projects frequently emerge from a critique of dehumanizing structural arrangements and alienating cultural discourse. Those for whom the critique is most profoundly embodied play a central role in the participatory inquiry and action, displacing notions of expertise common within the academy. The tasks of engaging in dialogue and problem-posing often lead to discontinuities in understandings as situated standpoints produce differences in ways of being and knowing. In the next section, we discuss an additional dimension of PAR as we consider ethical commitments within collective production of knowledge.

Layering Collective Analyses

Participatory analysis in PAR involves a layering of collective analyses with critical theory and ethical praxis. The iterative process creates openings for deeper understandings. As the research process unfolds and analyses become more nuanced, new inquiries can organically emerge. Often new questions are prompted by shifting sociopolitical contexts—perhaps evolutions of issues that sparked the research in the first place. This in turn can inspire additional methods, data, and/or analyses.

After the first group of LiT youth researchers left the project to pursue jobs, family responsibilities, and postsecondary education, another group of 25 young people joined the project and extended the work of the earliest LiT collective. This second phase of the LiT project decided to build on earlier analyses with a survey of youth experiences of educational transitions imposed on students, their families, and teachers, without their deliberation. The survey was administered to 258 students across the seven schools that the 25 youth researchers attended, some of which were neighborhood comprehensive high schools while others were recently established theme-based district schools.

The decision to create the survey reflected a continued desire to flesh out and fill in the absent student expertise in the conversation about school reform. Collecting more data on school closure, students changing schools, student–teacher relationships, and transportation challenges from the perspective of the students in the district promised a more nuanced analysis. Notably, it represented an ethical praxis within PAR to center the knowledge and rights of those most impacted by the conditions being studied. The initial LiT research revealed that teachers and students were invested in their teaching and learning and had often built strong communities in their “failed” schools, and the data called the dominant discourse on “failing schools” into question. In this way the emphasis within PAR to engage iterative inquiry processes grounded in lived experiences, layered with critical sociopolitical analyses of contemporary and historical policy and practice, enabled the LiT collective to avoid slipping into reproducing prevalent analyses that stereotyped and dismissed the experience of students and teachers. Drawing on the lessons of DuBois and Freire to resist these seductive and simplistic individual-level analyses that obscure the responsibility of broader sociopolitical power reflects an ethical stance within PAR. Ontologically, this interpretive stance opens space for understanding the realities encountered by students in relation to the conditions under which they are forced to live.

In reviewing the survey data, the LiT research collective engaged in an analytical conversation with data from across the life of the first and second phase of the LiT project, alongside analyses of local history, educational policy, and current structural conditions. For example, survey data showed that 59% of the ninth-grade students said students and teachers did not get along very well. This large percentage signaled a serious break in relationships central to meaningful learning and social and emotional safety among students and teachers. It concerned members of LiT in that it echoed dominant narratives of teacher indifference and student recalcitrance. However, student data also indicated teacher qualities that the collective agreed were important, such as teachers encouraging critical thinking and challenging their students to work hard. Some of the open-ended data on the impact of school closure indicated grief and anger over the severing of productive student relationships with teachers.

How would this apparent contradiction in the data be represented in the reporting back of research findings? This presented not only a question about interpretive validity but also a question about ethical responsibility. As noted by Guishard et al. ( 2018 ), “Knowing and knowledge production inherently come with an epistemological responsibility that is simultaneously, an ethical responsibility” (para. 40). Guishard et al. underscore the ethics inherent in data interpretation and with Thomas Teo call upon researchers to be aware of the responsibility researchers have to interrogate their frames of analysis in order to avoid the reproduction of harm through what Teo ( 2011 ) refers to as epistemological violence directed at communities that have been and may be further marginalized when “equally plausible interpretations of the data are available” and not accessed (p. 247). What interpretation offered validity from a critical and multilayered analysis?

After some discussion of what contributes to teachers and students not getting along, Anne and her university colleagues drew from transcripts of PAR meetings in the first phase of LiT that spoke of strained relationships among students and between students and teachers as schools closed and schools in other neighborhoods received displaced students. Holding together the different forms of data as well as the social and political history in the district allowed the collective to develop a more contextualized and complicated interpretation of survey data.

For example, when the youth researchers dug deeper into the data on students attending multiple schools, they found most of the students responding to the survey reported changing schools at some point in their K–8 trajectory, with 35% reporting having changed schools five to nine times and 6% indicating that school changes occurred more than nine times (Steggert & Galletta, 2018 ). These staggering numbers felt like an important contradiction within a district that uses a K–8 school structure in order to maintain continuity across the elementary and middle school grades. The data points sparked a shift in analysis within the research collective, wherein the phenomenon of “teachers and students not getting along” was no longer easily understood as teacher or student obstinance or disrespect.

Instead a more nuanced interpretation emerged that considered forced relocation; alienation; interrupted student–teacher relations; and severed family and community roots, traditions, and practices. This produced a key theme in the LiT findings: school closure and frequent changing of schools was associated with challenges for youth socially and academically. Situated analytically in relation to the history of school reform initiatives carried out in the district, often exacerbating students’ access to educational opportunity, the data supported LiT’s critique of reform initiatives that failed to actually improve their schools, particularly those serving the most economically stressed neighborhoods. Youth researchers prepared creative products such as video, poetry, and music to report back findings specific to their schools, presenting their findings in classrooms and engaging students who participated in the survey in further problem-posing through these discussions (Giraldo-Garcia & Galletta, 2015 ).

The inclusion of sociopolitical analysis is a key element of a critical PAR praxis, one that involves illuminating the connections between “personal, micro-level experiences of sociopolitical inequities to larger macro-level sociological forces” (Wright, 2015 , p. 196). Wright links this form of analysis to Freire’s concept of critical consciousness, of grasping that which was “not perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all)” (Freire, 1970/2016 , p. 83). Cahill, Rios-Moore, and Threatts ( 2008 ) engage similar analyses by posing three levels of interpretation, each intertwined with forms of social action: (a) involving looking “closely,” questioning, and examining how lived experience is influenced by broader economic and ideological processes; (b) seeing oneself and one’s community as connected to often unexamined histories; and (c) envisioning with others what could be possible as alternatives to the current struggles (pp. 90–92). We next examine what happened as the research collective engaged individuals and groups in positions of political power and influence when youth researchers and adult allies reported back their research findings.

Ethical Praxis and Epistemological Commitments

PAR opens up spaces within collectives of individuals differently positioned and engages standpoints of power and vulnerability. In doing so, dissonance and conflict arise, signaling moments of discontinuity. These moments offer potential for reframing existing knowledge and relationships. They also may result in the shutting down of transformative possibilities.

This is evident in the experience in which members of LiT reported back survey results. For example, LiT met with the leadership of the School Reform Partnership within Cleveland, the public-private partnership charged by the state with overseeing the city-wide school reform plan, to inform members of its board of the results of the survey. The School Reform Partnership involved elite membership of the city and county business leadership, influential private foundations, a charter organization supported by wealthy donors, higher education leadership, and local religious, community, and parent representatives.

Youth researchers Dana and Marcus arrived with Anne at the building that housed a major city foundation, where the School Reform Partnership also shared office space, described by Marcus as “really corporate-like.” When greeted by the director of this organization, it became clear the LiT reporting back session would take place with this individual and two staff, not the entire board of directors.

Marcus, Dana, and Anne shared the survey findings on the issue of school transportation, relationships between students, student–teacher relationships, frequency of students’ changing schools, and school closure. The clash of perspectives and vast differentials of power produced a stark clarity about how the district’s reform policy did not take the grounded experiences of students and teachers into account. It provided further evidence of one of the early themes of the first phase of the LiT research, that the reforms “were happening to us” without any form of participation along the way. Anne’s notes taken immediately after the meeting capture some of the exchange:

At one point Marcus spoke about what it was like to be at Granite Hill High School, designated by the district as an “investment” school. He talked about seeing his teachers face job insecurity in the school reform policy that required teachers to be interviewed for positions they had held previously, some for a long time. He noted, “students didn’t know if their teachers would be there” the following year . . . The Director of the School Reform Partnership seemed caught off guard by Marcus’ statement, his expression of concern for his teachers, and his affection toward his school. She commented that she hadn’t seen the reform strategies in the same way. Wouldn’t a student at Granite Hill express dissatisfaction with their school [given how poorly the school was performing]? There appeared to be some disjuncture evident to her at that moment, some gap between Marcus’ critique of the reform plan and her logic that “investment schools” were a way to remedy “failing schools.” She said something about not realizing students might love their schools even when their schools “failed” them.

The disjuncture at this moment within the meeting revealed a clear discontinuity of standpoints, commitments, and relations of power. At the same time, it offered the potential for producing new understandings. However, the potential opening apparent in this instance was not sustained or engaged. There was no opportunity to explore it further and produce new understandings and possibly reconfigure relationships or reframe the problems associated with underperforming schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. School closure and replacement, a possibility for Marcus’s school, was referred to as “inevitable” more than once by the director of the School Reform Partnership in talking with the LiT members. This reconnected to a moment three years earlier in the first phase of the LiT project when it was acknowledged that Granite Hill High School was “on the list.” This reference to a set of policy enactments that hung over students and teachers, something out of their control, was noted in a debriefing following the meeting of LiT with the partnership director. The following is an excerpt from the debriefing:

Anne: What point do you think engaged them the most? Marcus: Probably between transportation and school closings, school closings came up a lot. Dana: Yeah. Marcus: To the point that they’re unavoidable, or well, not unavoidable—they’re pretty much gonna happen at some point. Dana: Inevitable. Marcus: Yeah. Dana: Yeah and they kinda expressed that it's not necessarily all within their power if schools are closing but they agreed we need to make other aspects of students’ transition easier.

The naturalizing of the district’s reform strategy of school closure was so threaded through the conversation between the partnership leadership and the LiT members present that it appeared normative. This is evident in Marcus’s and Dana’s replication of the language of inevitability. Equally disturbing is the durability of statements repeated as real by Dana and Marcus when they reflected the director’s skirting of authority in the partnership’s involvement with school closures. In a setting where youth voice was presumably “heard,” the solution offered by the director during the meeting was to ease the transition for students but not end the policy of school closure. As noted by Anderson ( 2017 ), “In schools and districts, spaces for PAR open and close with frequency, making them risky and difficult to sustain when they challenge ‘NPM [new public management]’” (p. 440). The space of dissonance with its potential for transformation was cut short.

In the LiT project, this was evident in the discontinuity that surfaced, however momentary, in the meeting between LiT members and the School Reform Partnership director. Opening space for altering existing ways of knowing and being in relation, for interpretive ambiguity, and for relational dissonance creates cracks and fissures in the status quo from which transformational change might emerge. This level of change can feel impossible at times, for as Freire ( 2016 ) quotes from an unpublished work of José Luiz Fiori, “the structure of domination is maintained by its own mechanical and unconscious functionality” (p. 51, n 6). In the LiT project this dominant resistance was evidenced by the director’s ultimate dismissive statement of school closure as “inevitable.” Her comment, and the dissonance it created, provoked the LiT collective to spend time thinking about their own goals for their research, the ethics of representation, how the data they collected might be used for and against communities to which they felt responsible, which audiences were most important to them, and how they might best be engaged.

Engaging Action

In the iterative movement between inquiry and action throughout the life of a PAR project, the “action” of problem-posing takes as many forms—a reflection of the many different theories of change held by individual researchers and/or research collectives (Tuck & Yang, 2013 ). Typical understandings of action may involve engaging communities of interest in the findings of a PAR project or carrying out strategies responsive to the research findings, such as a plan to address issues uncovered through the research. Many PAR projects also recognize the transformative experiences of members of the research collective as actions (Zeller-Berkman, 2007 ). But actions can also occur or engage those who are “insiders to the problem” who were not involved in the PAR project, as well as press those not directly impacted but who are in positions of power as it relates to the research findings.

Engaging “outsiders” or those whose lives appear not to be directly impacted by the findings can be challenging to collectives interested in provoking sustained changes in thought and action. Moving a listener or, more broadly, an audience toward engaged witnessing from a position of bystanding (Watkins & Shulman, 2008 ) requires forms of “mutual implication” that some have been successful achieving through embodied and performative methodologies (Stoudt, Fox, & Fine, 2012 ). This is not an easy, or always possible, process. There are instances when opening understandings of mutual implication and/or a sense of connected futures are impeded by seemingly intractable dynamics of privilege that refuse to concede conditions of power (Bell, 1995 ). As a result, the ethical and epistemological commitments of critical PAR insist that collectives intentionally address ideological and structural relations. In the case of the LiT project, this meant deepening an understanding in the political and economic investments in corporate school reform.

To reach insiders familiar with the challenges young people faced within an increasingly privatized approach to school reform, such as other students and teachers, as well as those in decision-making positions in the district, the LiT collective agreed to present its findings at a prestigious city-wide gathering attended by youth, educators, district officials, and members of the School Reform Partnership. Sharing their mixed method study, including the survey data and autoethnographic texts, the youth researchers skillfully layered their lived experience in relation to historical and structural conditions. Youth in the audience, who had not been involved in the research, joined the LiT members at the podium twice, first to narrate stories from the open-ended survey data on transportation challenges getting to and from school and second to convey students’ responses to school closure.

Having deliberated on how best to offer a contextually valid frame from which to present survey findings, Marcus explained survey data and shared his grounded experience in school. During his part of the presentation, his focus was on the complex predicament students and teachers found themselves facing as their lives were shaped by the imposition of high-stakes state testing impacting students’ ability to graduate, teachers’ security in their jobs, and the longevity of schools to serve their communities. Marcus situated the finding that 59% of the ninth-grade students indicated that students and teachers did not get along in the fragile state of relations at the classroom level, revealing the complicity of local and state policy in creating untenable educational conditions:

stress might cause students and teachers to be more edgy towards each other due to the teacher being pressured about getting good scores. Teachers are evaluated on 4 dimensions of their teaching, which accounts for 50% of their evaluation. The other 50% is the scores students get on the state tests. This can lead to teachers getting stressed along with the students, which would alter the ways students and teachers would interact with each other. Teachers and students would be on edge and would react in negative ways. Not only that, but teachers' jobs would be on the line and students wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. (Galletta et al., 2014 )

In addition to forums for engaging differentially positioned audience members in research findings, other forms of PAR-related action may involve boycotts, walkouts, the use of performance for analysis and sharing back findings (Fox, 2011 ), securing agreements with administrators for school change (Ozer et al., 2010 ), accessible “back pocket reports” and open letters (Stoudt & Torre, 2014 ), social media activism, and messaging through hashtags, t-shirts, buttons, and the creative arts (Otero & Cammarota, 2011 ; Stoudt et al., 2015 ). Common threads across these forms of action provide a distinct break with existing ways of knowing and being in relation and an upending of that which is presumed natural or inevitable. In this manner, PAR addresses epistemological commitments and ontological imperatives as it reflects the desire among those most impacted by a social or educational problem to give it meaning and transformative potential, thus producing what Fals-Borda and Rahman ( 1991 ) refer to as “countervailing power.”

Through the story of the LiT project, we have illustrated critical moments within a PAR project when tensions flared as to the meaning of educational policy and its impact on students and teachers. In an active effort to spark change in the district and share research findings with the city’s leadership responsible for recommending school closure, members of the LiT project encountered contestation over what meaning youth gave to their relationships with teachers in academically struggling schools. The implications of the divergence were dismissed, school closure was labeled inevitable, and the effort to reframe the impact of school closure was shut down.

However, when tensions within PAR can be sustained, new meanings and new ways of being in relation surface. By staying open to different interpretations of data on “teachers and students not getting along,” the LiT research collective suspended the socially dominant discourse on “bad teaching” or “problem students” and pursued additional data sources. This enabled a deeper understanding of what was happening within and beyond classrooms that affected relationships between students and teachers. Contradictions that emerged in the clash between students’ lived experience and the city’s school reform logic offered the potential to generate new understandings. The participatory contact zone of the research collective held the dissonance and encouraged an interrogation of power that destabilized the privileged discourse and knowledge structures.

As the attacks on public education continue—and as capitalism, the rise of white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy strengthen—we find ourselves with a heightened sense of urgency for new ways of seeing, hearing, and understanding. We believe a PAR framework has the ability to create solidarity spaces for inquiry that can produce necessary knowledge for justice struggles in education and beyond. Participatory spaces are where people can come together across a continuum of privilege and vulnerability to make meaning of the conditions under which we are living, with each other, for our collective liberation. The extensive reach of privatization within public education, the narrowing public governance to business and philanthropic interests and priorities, and the deceptive branding of corporate reform as “equity” is sobering. PAR offers a research praxis of countervailing power and accumulative tremors to agitate static ways of knowing and being in relation and makes possible a generative approach to collective inquiry for transformation.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the contributions of Dr. vanessa jones to the Lives in Transition project, the support of Dr. Carmine Stewart, and the creativity, questioning, and care among the youth researchers, educators, graduate students, and community members who participated in our collective over multiple years.

Further Reading

• Cahill, C. , Rios-Moore, I. , & Threatts, T. (2008). Open eyes—Different eyes: PAR as a process of personal and social transformation. In J. Cammarota & M. Fine (Eds.), Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion (pp. 89–124). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Cammarota, J. , & Fine, M. (Eds.). (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion . New York, NY: Routledge.
• Caraballo, L. , Lozenski, B. D. , Lyiscott, J. , & Morrell, E. (2017). YPAR and critical epistemologies: Rethinking education research . Review of Research in Education , 41 , 311–336.
• Drame, E. R. , & Irby, D. (2016). Black participatory research: Power, identity, and the struggle for justice in education . New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
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• Freire, P. (2016). Pedagogy of the oppressed . New York, NY: Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1970.)
• Galletta, A. (2017). Exploring generative dissonance: Inten[s]ional states and relational interruptions . Social & Personality Psychology Compass , 11 (9).
• Giraldo-Garcia, R. , & Galletta, A. (2015). What happened to our sense of justice? Tracing agency, inquiry, and action in a youth participatory action research (PAR) project. Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, & Research , 11 , 91–98.
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1. When using the term participatory action research or PAR in this article we are referring to a framework that attends to relational, structural, and cultural arrangements of power throughout the research process. While at times we signal this specifically by describing the approach as “critical,” for the ease of reading we ask the reader to understand that this is always implied.

2. Although the city, school district, and university are identified, all student, teacher, and high school names are pseudonyms.

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Action Research

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Action research is a method used by teachers to solve everyday issues in the classroom. It is a reflective, democratic, and action-based approach to problem-solving or information-seeking in the classroom. Instead of waiting for a solution, action research empowers teachers to become critical and reflective thinkers and lifelong learners that are dedicated to helping improve student learning and teaching effectiveness.

Teachers or program leaders can take on an action research project by framing a question, carrying out an intervention or experiment, and reporting on the results. Below you’ll find resources, examples, and simple steps to help you get started.

Action Research in Early Childhood Education

Steps for action research.

1. Identify a Topic

Topics for action research can include the following:

• Changes in classroom practice
• Effects of program restructuring
• New understanding of students
• Teacher skills and competencies
• New professional relationships
• New content or curricula
• What problem do you want to solve? What information are you seeking?
• What data will need to be collected to help find a solution or answer?
• How will it be collected, by whom and from whom?
• How can you assure that your data will be reliable?

3. Collect Data

A mixed-method approach is a great way to ensure that your data is valid and reliable since you are gathering data from more than one source. This is called triangulation.

Mixed-methods research is when you integrate quantitative and qualitative research and analysis in a single study. Quantitative data is data that can be measured and written down with numbers. Some examples include attendance records, developmental screening tests, and attitude surveys. Qualitative data is data that cannot be measured in a numerical format. Some examples include observations, open-ended survey responses, audio recordings, focus groups, pictures, and in-depth interviews.

Ethically, even if your research will be contained in the classroom, it is important to get permission from the director or principal and parents. If your data collection involves videotaping or photographing students, you should review and follow school procedures. Always make sure that you have a secure place to store data and that you respect the confidentiality of your students.

4. Analyze and Interpret the Data

It’s important to consider when data will be able to answer your question. Were you looking for effects right away or effects that last until the end of the school year? When you’re done, review all of the data and look for themes. You can then separate the data into categories and analyze each group. Remember the goal of the analysis is not only to help answer the research question, but to gain understanding as a teacher.

5. Carry out an Action Plan to Improve Your Practice 

After the analysis, summarize what you learned from the study.

• How can you share your findings?
• What new research questions did the study prompt you to research next?
• What actionable steps can you make as a result of the findings?

Pine, G. J. (2008). Teacher action research: building knowledge democracies. Sage Publications.

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How to Do Action Research in Your Classroom

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Sign up for the webinar “Exploring the potential of action research in language education: Opportunities and challenges in local and global contexts”

Tuesday, 21 May 2024 17:00- 18:00 CET

Sign up for the webinar  “Exploring the potential of action research in language education: Opportunities and challenges in local and global contexts”

Action research communities (ARC) ( .https://wwwecml.at/actionresearch ) webinar with Dr. Jane O’Toole (Teacher (Scoil Chrónáin Senior National School, Dublin https://www.stcronanssns.ie ) CARN Coordinating Group Member (Collaborative Action Research Network https://www.carn.org.uk ) Researcher ( https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jane-Otoole-3 ))

As a follow-up event to ARC Trainings and Consultancies, the ARC-Network is inviting you to participate in our interactive webinar which will explore the potential of action research in language education.

• Why action research?
• How does an action research methodology support language education both in terms of research and practice?
• What are the opportunities and challenges that arise in conducting action research in the sphere of language education?
• How might I go about integrating action research into my practice as a language educator?

These are just some of the questions to be unpacked as we examine both local and global contexts of language education. The webinar will be presented by Dr. Jane O'Toole, a practising schoolteacher in Ireland with a special interest in both language education and action research. The discussion will include insights into the Irish language context which will serve to illuminate the opportunities and challenges of action research in endangered language contexts in addition to inviting participants to share perspectives on their own local and global understandings of language education.

Target groups: The webinar which is moderated by the ARC team is open to everyone. It is likely to be of particular interest to participants in the Action research Communities’ Training and Consultancy workshops (and those registered for 2024 events) as well as to members of the CARN Network.

Webinar language: English 

As only a limited number of places are available for the webinar, registration will be based on a first come, first served basis.

To register please sign up here

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New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

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Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

Jonathan Lambert

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

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In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam , a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman , draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

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"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp , a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher , an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing " sync up " with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer , a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley , a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive , and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

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