Improving Schools Through Action Research: A Comprehensive Guide for Educators

Improving Schools Through Action Research, 2/e

Cher Hendricks

0205578462

This brief, user-friendly text provides everything a pre-service or in-service educator needs to know to follow the research cycle and conduct an action research project.  It emphasizes the reflective processes used in planning and conducting action research studies, data analysis techniques (quantitative and qualitative), and displaying and explaining results. The text provides specific information needed to complete each step of the action research cycle with chapter activities that help the student/reader conduct projects focused on school improvement. Each activity includes a research paper component that helps students create a research paper as they complete the activities.

New to this edition:

• Chapter 3, Connecting Theory and Action, has been extended to provide more detailed information on synthesizing and writing the literature.
• Chapter 6, which focuses on validity issues, has been streamlined and clarified. Validity issues are described in an understandable and simple way, and examples and tables are provided to help clarify difficult concepts.
• Internet links and other supporting information are provided on using Microsoft Excel for data entry and analysis.
• An in-depth discussion of writing in APA format is included in Chapter 8, Writing and Disseminating the Action Research Report . The chapter also provides alternative ways to report findings including via narrative accounts, portrait writing, and artistic forms.

Here’s what your colleagues are saying:

“This is the most effective text currently available to help teachers systematically examine their practice and make research-based changes in their classrooms and schools to increase student engagement and student achievement. Hendricks succeeds admirably in creating a handbook that teachers can actually use to gather and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data in their classrooms, helping them to procure far more meaningful data about student performance than any standardized test could ever hope to provide. If our nation is serious about closing the achievement gap, we need much more investment in the meaningful professional development that occurs when teachers study their own practice in the ways that Hendricks describes.”

–Joseph M. Shosh, Moravian College

“This book is an excellent introduction to action research for a beginning teacher researcher. It is written in a style that seems to put the readers at ease, even those who are initially apprehensive about conducting research.”

–Elizabeth Fogarty, East Carolina University