Planning for Action Research

My action research plan will be conducted to answer the following question:

What is the impact of home video lectures, virtual collaborations, and learning artifacts on student engagement and acquisition of learning concepts in elementary students?

What method and research design will you use?

The action research will be conducted using a sequential explanatory, mixed-methods design. The rationale for choosing the sequential explanatory, mixed-methods design approach is to better interpret study results.

How will you deal with your research participants (privacy, ethics, etc.)?

To maintain the integrity of this action research survey, I plan to implement the following measures in effort to ensure that information collected from study participants remains voluntary, confidential and secure.

1. Both participants and their parents will be required to sign a

consent form and participation agreement prior to beginning the

study. Only participants who are allowed permission to

participate will be included in the study.

2. Teacher will sign an agreement to not discuss or share any

individual student information collected during the research

process with anyone.

3. Participant names will not be used. Each student will be

assigned a random number to use for identification purposes.

4. The names of the participants, teacher, and school will remain

anonymous if/when research results are shared with audiences

5. Interviews will be conducted one-on-one in a private area away

from others.

6. Physical data collected will be stored in a locked file cabinet in the

teacher’s classroom. Once the study is over, all documents will

be shredded.

7. Online/digital data collected will be saved and stored on the

teacher’s Google Drive in a folder whose name is not indicative of

the contents. Once the study is over, all documents will be

deleted from the teacher’s Google Drive.

8. Teacher will not collect data from students on days when they are

tired, sick, unfocused, or experiencing behavior issues.

What general procedures will you follow?

For the first month, students will receive lectures in a traditional, in-class format. Their amount of participation during lectures, daily work grades, and quiz grades will be recorded and averaged out at the end of each week. At the end of the month, I will interview students one-on-one to get their feelings and opinions of the in-class lecture format. For Month 2, students will engage in the home-based lecture activities. Their number of logins, posts to the discussion board, collaborative activities, attendance sheets and assignments turned in will be recorded weekly and averaged out at the end of each week. At the end of the month, I will interview students one-on-one to get their feelings and opinions about the at-home lecture format. Data from both months will then be analyzed together for trends and correlations to determine the effectiveness of the at-home lectures on student engagement and acquisition of knowledge-based content.

What are your measures?

Since mixed-method research is being used to conduct this study, I will use both quantitative and qualitative measures.

What instruments will you use to gather your data?

The type of quantitative and qualitative instruments used will depend on the learning environment being studied. When conducting action research in the traditional classroom environment, I plan to collect quantitative data using a teacher-created engagement checklist and qualitative data will be collected using observation notes of students’ abilities to draw conclusions, inference, make connections, and reason during in-class lectures. For data collection during the home-based, online setting, I plan to track the number of times the teacher-created, online attendance sheet is signed and submitted, the number of online assignments turned in, and the number and frequency of relevant posts to the class discussion boards and log-ins to assignment websites.

Qualitative data during research in the home-based, online setting will be collected using observation notes of students’ abilities to draw conclusions, inference, make connections, and reason during discussion board posts and open-ended questions presented in online assignments. For both the traditional class setting and home-base, online setting, I will also use scores from vocabulary daily work, cloze activity, and content quizzes as part of quantitative data collection and one-on-one interviews with students as part of qualitative data collection.

How will you manage and handle your results and data?

Physical data collected will be stored in a locked file cabinet in my classroom. Once the study is over, all documents will be shredded. Online/digital data collected will be saved and stored on the teacher’s Google Drive in a folder whose name is not indicative of the contents. Once the study is over, all documents will be deleted from my Google Drive.

How do you plan to share and discuss your results?

I plan to organize all of my information into a digital presentation (I haven't yet decided which program I want to use) and present my findings to my administrators. We will discuss what worked, what didn't work, and would could be done in the next cycle of action research to improve on the plan.

REFERENCES

Mertler, C. A. (2020). Action research: Improving schools and empowering educators (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.