Action Research

Action research is a form of reflective inquiry with intended use and users; practitioners in their own educational settings conduct it in order to improve their own professional practice and outcomes for students. Through action research, educators identify pressing problems of professional practice and engage in data collection, analysis, and interpretation, with the intention of understanding gaps between desired and actual results and achieving genuine improvements in the quality of their instruction and student learning. The action research process and resultant findings can equip practitioners with the knowledge they need to make real-time, evidence-based decisions about schooling, teaching, and learning. This entry discusses the development of action research as a method of inquiry, how and why action research is used in PreK–16 schools and barriers to the action research use in these schools.

Educators engage in action research in order to continuously test their working theories as to what works and what doesn’t in schools and classrooms. It is the individuals’ immediate use of data to inform and/or improve their practice that most distinguishes “action” research from more traditional academic research where educators may have little input into study design, data collection, or interpretation. This method of inquiry is most common among professionals in PreK–16 educational settings, including regular and special education teachers, school principals, district superintendents, instructional coaches, school counselors, and school psychologists.

Action research is arguably the most valid, powerful, and important tool that professionals in PreK–16 settings have at their disposal to make meaningful, ongoing, and sustained positive changes to their practice intended to bring about essential outcomes. Action researchers can acquire greater congruity between the values they espouse and the values they enact in practice in classrooms and across systems. Action research is ideal for those who hold participatory, democratic, and improvement-oriented worldviews concerned with the development of rich, valid, contextually useful information for the improvement of teaching, learning, and schooling.