The purpose of the final report is to share ideas with others in your community of practice who would value the knowledge you gained. How are you going to share it with them? Action Researchers will need to decide what to write and to whom to write.
One of the strongest acts of leadership can be the quiet act of writing—of sharing what you have learned. Writing helps you to reach people that you will never see. It is a very powerful act. Through writing, you make a contribution to the body of knowledge that exists beyond yourself.
A Written Report
This is the template that we recommend to students at Pepperdine University for their Master of Arts Thesis, but there are multiple ways to organize an action research report.
INTRODUCTION: The significance of the problem I am addressing. The reader needs to be invited to think about the problem at the widest level. This should answer the question --Why should a read this, why should I care about this study? This is not about the context but about the problem and how it is linked to your visions for a different future.
THE CONTEXT :
WORK/COMMUNITY CONTEXT:Once you have a posed a problem at a general level, you will need to provide the context of your work. There are two parts to this. One if the local context (this section) and the other is the professional context (review of literature). These can come in whatever order makes sense to you.In your local context, you may want to describe your membership/position in your community of practice and how you worked in this setting to address the problem you have established.
LITERATURE REVIEWThe literature is other way to set the context for your work. What have others done that inform my understanding of the problem? What theories or predictions about outcomes come from past research? How is what you plan to do similar or different from what others have tried?
THE RESEARCH
RESEARCH QUESTION:The research question sets up your inquiry. The overall question is the overarching problem selected. The cycles questions are sub questions that helped address this larger issue in different ways.
REPORT OF CYCLES OF RESEARCHAction research takes place in cycles. Each cycles is a discrete experiment--taking action as a way of studying change. Your report needs to include --either a detailed report for each cycle as follows or a report of the cycles in a more summary format.
CYCLE RESEARCH QUESTION: This question needs to contain two very important parts. The first part clearly states what you will do in very specific language. The second part shares your best guess at an outcome. (The reactions of others that you expect to result from your action.) Your action research is a design experiment. You are designing with an eye toward deeper understanding of design action.
EVIDENCE USED TO EVALUATE THE ACTION: What evidence will you collect to tell you how others respond to your action? Where will you look to give you direct or indirect evidence of what happened?
EVALUATION: How will you/did you evaluate the outcomes of your action?.....(Indicate your plans for your analysis in a paragraph or two).
REFLECTION: Looking back on my action with the benefit of data, I now think... and if I were to do this again I would have.... The thing that worked best was... What most surprised me from the data was...
FINAL REFLECTION:
This is where the action research really takes stock of what was learned. It might be helpful to think of a reflection as a set of connections between the past, present and future. If this section is only a summary of what was happened, it will fail as a reflection. A reflection provides a deep understanding of why things happened as they did and how those outcomes help you address your overarching question. At the end of writing a good reflection, you will know more than you did when you started it. If you haven't gained some new insights about the problem and your actions to solve it, it is likely that you are only summarizing what happened. Reflection is a powerful learning experience. It is an essential part of action research.
REFERENCES
The references provide the context for your ideas. In many ways, the references indicated the community of researchers and writers that you are writing for.
Publishing on the Web in Portfolio:
An important part of the Action Research process is posting and sharing artifacts of the inquiry, so that the action researcher can continually reflect on practice and so that peers can contribute feedback and support. The Web Portfolio, then, becomes a place for both internal and external reflection.
A good action research portfolio, like a report, documents practices at each step of the inquiry. The accumulation of content provides critical mass for reflection and for recognizing change of practice. There is no perfect template for an Action Research Portfolio. One key idea, however, is to be sure to document each cycle and gather artifacts accordingly. That documentation process should utilize both descriptive and reflective writing.
The Center for Collaborative Action Research has collected Action Research Portfolios that serve as effective models. The model portfolios are categorized in two groups: School Action Research for projects that help improve instructional practices and Community Action Research for projects in University, Corporate, and other Community settings.
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