Action research: Teachers as researchers in the classroom was a very useful “handbook” for helping to write the action research paper. I think the most helpful components were chapters 4, 5, and 6. I had not been familiar with all of the different sub-types of quantitative and qualitative studies. This book gave a nice overview of it. What would have helped additionally was perhaps an outside article that gave more detailed descriptions of the differences between some of the quantitative studies because I found them to be very similar as they were explained in this book.
The description in Chapter 5 of how to determine reliability and consistency for quantitative data was also useful. I had not been introduced to the formulas for testing these and this book made it easy to follow. I also found the analyzing data walk-through of StatCrunch to be helpful and made me think about what I needed to calculate. It has been many years since I took a statistics class and back then I was confused of when to use different formulas. This book streamlined the formulas, made it easy to determine what formulas were needed, and how to apply them.
I would recommend this book for future classes. It was a great, concise overview of the action research process. The first few chapters were probably helpful for people who have not had experience with action research in the past. While the later chapters, were useful for anyone who is conducting action research as it reminds you of the minute steps to consider when conducting these projects.
Only a couple of the outside articles I found useful. The most useful was Guidelines for Developing Action Research Questions (Riel, 2011), because it gave another lenses for thinking about my own action research project. The other articles seemed to become rather redundant of the textbook or of each other. An outside article that I had to read for another class I found helpful when thinking about my theoretical framework. That article was The Teacher’s Guide to Diversity from Brown University part I (Trumbull & Pacheco, 2005). This gave a good refresher of the different educational theories.
The description in Chapter 5 of how to determine reliability and consistency for quantitative data was also useful. I had not been introduced to the formulas for testing these and this book made it easy to follow. I also found the analyzing data walk-through of StatCrunch to be helpful and made me think about what I needed to calculate. It has been many years since I took a statistics class and back then I was confused of when to use different formulas. This book streamlined the formulas, made it easy to determine what formulas were needed, and how to apply them.
I would recommend this book for future classes. It was a great, concise overview of the action research process. The first few chapters were probably helpful for people who have not had experience with action research in the past. While the later chapters, were useful for anyone who is conducting action research as it reminds you of the minute steps to consider when conducting these projects.
Only a couple of the outside articles I found useful. The most useful was Guidelines for Developing Action Research Questions (Riel, 2011), because it gave another lenses for thinking about my own action research project. The other articles seemed to become rather redundant of the textbook or of each other. An outside article that I had to read for another class I found helpful when thinking about my theoretical framework. That article was The Teacher’s Guide to Diversity from Brown University part I (Trumbull & Pacheco, 2005). This gave a good refresher of the different educational theories.
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