What is action research?

More and more teachers are taking part in action research in their own settings: but what does research say is best practice for doing so?

Action research is a practice-based research method, designed to bring about change in a context. In the context of schools, it might be a teacher-led investigation, usually conducted within the teacher’s own school or classroom.

When a problem or question is identified, an initiative is devised to address it. Following implementation, the impact is then assessed and reflected upon. This reflection may lead to amendments to the initiative, before repeating the process again.

The EEF view: what are the implications for education research?

Schools are learning organisations. They continuously strive to be better for the children and young people in their charge. In doing so, they try new things, seek to learn from those experiences, and work to adopt and embed the practices that work best.

The aim of action research in an education setting might be to gather and interpret data to identify priorities, or to assess how effective a new approach or intervention is. Two important aspects of action research are gathering relevant and rigorous data and then generating credible and plausible interpretations of that data.

For example, a primary school might have identified a problem with key stage 2 reading attainment. It might decide to investigate this through gathering data. Internal test data might show that some pupils have limited background knowledge, lesson observations might show different approaches to teaching phonics, and pupil interviews might reveal weak motivation for reading.

Through this process, the school can identify areas for improvement and then implement strategies to address them. Each implemented strategy represents a new opportunity for action research - enacting the change, using a range of data to assess whether the change has worked as intended, and making decisions about sustaining the change or making adjustments.

One of two particular strengths of action research is that it takes advantage of rich practitioner knowledge throughout the process - using practitioner expertise to identify the question/problem, drive action and data gathering, and inform reflection. Secondly, where action research takes place within a single setting, any changes and conclusions take context into account and are likely to indicate if the change might be suitable across the setting.

However, this context-specific approach may mean that findings are not generalisable to other settings, so it wouldn’t be appropriate to implement in another context without undertaking a similar cycle of action and reflection. It is also important that interventions and approaches implemented and investigated via action research are drawn from wider, robust research evidence.

If you are looking to undertake action research in your setting, you should aim to use data from a range of sources to build a rich picture of the issue you’re looking to improve. This could include national and internal test data, lesson observations and Ofsted data, as well as insights from surveys and interviews. Then you need to think about how each piece of data provides evidence for the problem. But take care not to over-interpret from the various data sources.

Where can I see this in action?

In 2021, teacher and apprenticeship manager Dave Shurmer conducted research that looked at the impact that increased physical activity has on pupils’ academic attainment in literacy and numeracy.

He asked pupils to skip for two minutes before English or maths lessons. At the end of the term, pupils sat a Sats practice paper. Shurmer compared the data from before and after the term for a conditioned and unconditioned group, and found that when the pupils skipped before lessons once a week, they went on to gain an extra mark on their test papers. When they skipped twice a week, they gained an extra two marks.

In 2022, English teacher Katie Packman wrote about her action research project for Tes: after struggling to enthuse key stage 3 students in creative writing, she decided to introduce a workshopping approach. For one hour a week, students were given free rein to choose a creative writing project to develop. She held one-on-one tutorials to give feedback, and students had to plan and then draft their piece, and continue to work on it or start planning their next piece, until their next tutorial. In the end-of-year assessment results, 27 out of 28 students had made expected progress, and 65 per cent of those had made higher-than-expected progress.

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