Classroom-Based Action Research

CBAR: An Illustration

The management team of an education improvement area (EIA) encouraged local school teachers to conduct action research into their practices to discover effective approaches for improving classroom experiences that might benefit all learners in this disadvantaged neighbourhood. The EIA provided funding and specialist input into a university-designed action research master's programme for teachers that was delivered in the evenings in a local school.

Following discussions with her tutor and the EIA learning director, one participating teacher investigated her numeracy lessons with 9- to 10-year-old pupils. From the work which pupils submitted for marking, she could find little evidence that her feedback practices were actually improving the children's subsequent approaches to problem-solving. Close examination of the term's numeracy workbooks revealed very few examples of where the learners had acted upon the guidance given in her written comments. Having attended a short introductory EIA course ‘Formative Assessment’, [Page 104]she decided to experiment with a peer-tutoring and feedback activity. She organized pairs of learners to check each other's solutions to problems and negotiate an agreed solution when there was a difference between their suggested answers. The teacher discovered that following this intervention, the children were better able to articulate their mathematical thinking in discussion, and their workbooks revealed greater evidence of their attempting improved approaches to numeracy problem-solving in later lessons. However, she discovered that two learners had such little confidence in their knowledge of numeracy strategies that the exercise was proving confusing and unhelpful for them. Consequently, whenever she later repeated the paired activity with the class, she remained working closely with these two learners to provide a managed structure that would help them make confident progress with fundamental strategies.

The teacher shared her experiment with her head teacher, and she was asked to informally present her findings at the next after-school staff meeting, to discuss with her colleagues whether the peer feedback activities might be transferable to other classrooms. The director of the EIA also visited to observe the paired activities in progress, and the teacher's experiment was later presented at an EIA development day. The teacher wrote up this classroom action research study towards her master's award, and the supervising tutor drew on the teacher's findings about formative assessment strategies to inform her own teacher education curriculum.

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