Action Research Projects

The Action Research Project is primarily used in the field of Education, although this format can be used in other disciplines such as Social Work. Action research is quite often the preferred culminating project for education majors because of its emphasis on the use of scientific methods to acquire not just useful information, but information that can be used immediately. Typically undertaken in actual K-12 classroom settings, the action research project is designed to not only study the effects of a given methodology, approach, or pedagogy, but also to provide real benefits, in real time, to real participants (students, administrators, teachers, etc.). In this way, action research is an incredibly organic approach.

The rationale is clear. If you know something works, why wait months, let alone years, to put that knowledge into play? For example, if a high school teacher has discovered, in her research, a sure-fire method of teaching fractions to at-risk students, why should she wait to help her students just because her thesis research is underway? Action research is designed to allow her to put that method into place right away, and capitalizes on that action by studying how it goes in the classroom.

Of course, this is a simplistic explanation of a more complicated endeavor, but the idea is clear: because teacher-researchers work with “subjects” who are almost always actual students, it would be unethical to withhold helpful knowledge from the classroom, just because a study is on-going. It is far better to incorporate the new information into the study.

This style of research is particularly suited to graduate-level education majors because they are, quite often, already teachers themselves, and thus have a ready group of people whom they can study. Action research projects are also quite user-friendly for education majors because they don't require the same level of clearance through the university's Institutional Review Board (IRB), which is generally quite strict on anyone wishing to conduct a study in which humans are used as subjects. This is because the teacher is already working with his or her students; it is assumed that s/he will implement the proposed pedagogical approaches whether or not a formal study will be conducted, so there is no need for approval.

However, this is also one of the more challenging aspects of action research projects. They are designed to evolve as they progress, as opposed to more traditional field research projects which are considered tainted if they change over the course of the research process. This can make the methodology quite tricky, not to mention hard to keep up with as there is limited time in which to make all modifications.

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