What is Action Research??

I certainly won't pretend to be an expert on what we call action research or administrative inquiry, but I am learning about it through my course on Research at Lamar University (Master of Education in Educational Administration).

As a requirement for this course, students have been asked to read Nancy Dana's Leading With Passion and Knowledge: The Principal as Action Researcher.  I was somewhat confused at first, but once I started the reading, I gained a better understanding.  

I learned that administrative inquiry or action research can be defined as a process that principals (or other administrators) work through using systematic, intentional studying of his or her own practices, then basing their actions or decisions on the knowledge that the administrators gain as a result of the process (Dana, 2009).  It appears that the author uses the terms administrative inquiry and action research interchangeably, so I probably will as well.

Action research benefits include: theories and knowledge that are grounded in reality; collaboration by the practitioners in the investigation of problems; increase in the facilitation of change due to the direct involvement of the practitioners in the research process (Dana, 2009).

Action research differs from “process-product research” in that it is not performed by “outsiders”, but is in fact performed by the principal, teachers, and students that are directly impacted on a daily basis.  The researchers become the problem solvers.  It increases the likelihood that everyone from the principal down will “buy in” to the proposed solutions.  Often, districts will try a pre-packaged, fit-all solution only to discover that it doesn’t work in all schools.  This is especially true if there are significant differences across the district.  When you have affluent schools with ample resources and Title I schools with limited resources, the same solution cannot necessarily be successfully implemented in the same way on the different campuses.

Administrative inquiry differs from qualitative studies in that the researchers’ roles are not limited as they are with qualitative studies.  Again, “outsiders” are not the people collecting, studying, and analyzing the data.  Those tasks are performed by the people who have a direct need to solve the problem.  Action research highlights the role of the practitioners as “knowledge generators” and allows focus on the concerns of those involved instead of those from outside (Dana, 2009).  Sometimes a problem has different roots at different levels of education, even within one campus.  The behavior problems seen in a sixth grade classroom are often completely different than those seen in an eighth grade classroom, therefore one “bottled” fix-all may not be the best way to address the behavior issues as a whole.