Book Review

Book title : Action Research in Teaching and Learning: A practical guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities.
Author : Lin S. Norton
Publisher : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
State : New York, NY
Year : 2009

This book consists of eleven chapters. Here is the list of chapters in this book:
1. Putting pedagogical action research into the university context: what are the pressures?
2. Why being a reflective practitioner?
3. Why engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning?
4. What is the case for pedagogical action research?
5. Where do you start a pedagogical action research study?
6. What are the most suitable research methodologies?
7. How can you analyse qualitative data in pedagogical action research?
8. How can you analyse quantitative data in pedagogical action research?
9. How can you develop and adapt pedagogical research tools?
10. What are the ethical issues involved in pedagogical action research?
11. Going public: How can you grow the influence of your findings?


Chapter 1: Putting pedagogical action research into the university context: what are the pressures?

Some pressure faced by the researcher is time, commitment and resources. In order to achieve targeted goal, it require more justification and knowledge about their own research, so at the end the others will not argue about their findings. There are three level of academic practice:
1. The macro level – include the institution, external factors, academic labour and the research-teaching nexus.
2. The meso level - the department and the subject discipline.
3. The micro level – internal factors affecting the individual lecturer.


Chapter 2: Why being a reflective practitioner?

Reflective practice means that we will reflect regarding our own new situations or problems. New situation may develop new experience and new challenges that had to be faced by teacher. This is a core element of teachers’ work because it will improve their own practice, students and teacher will modeling the reflective process for students. Action research enables us to reflect on our teaching in a systematic way as well as encourages academics to take control of their own professional development by being active learners. This because action research encourages collaboration, increase teacher willingness spending time addressing education problems and gives teachers a voice to improve academic situation. Collaborative action research (CAR) always links together with action research. Within CAR, researcher will develop questions based on their own experiences and try to answer it by doing their own methods or cycle through various processes such as implementing, monitor the effects, refining the action, retesting, reflecting and so on. CAR share the same characteristics as action research where learning is predicated on active experience and improvement through cyclical processes provide a successful result for long term effect.

There are also some probable factors that can limit reflective practice. It’s hard to change beliefs or practices which had been routine for thousand of years of some institution because action research will bring improvement. Being passive and not accept any change give a greater barrier in order to implement the research cycle. Also feedback and evaluations can be affected by other factors. Reflective practice also requires a lot of time and energy in order to achieve targeted goals. Reflective process also being too concern with the current practical problem in teaching and learning which influence other social problem become less important.


Chapter 3: Why engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning?
The concept of scholarship were introduced since research and teaching being in opposition to each other. Privileged of new findings and any other important aspects of academic works were unreasonable. Scholarship for each country was different depends on the economy and political condition. So, Boyer (1990) proposed four domains of scholarship:
1. The scholarship of discovery.
2. The scholarship of integration.
3. The scholarship of application.
4. The scholarship of teaching.

There are also four differing conceptions of the scholarship of teaching:
1. Teachers conduct and publish research.
2. Scholarship of teaching as teaching excellence.
3. Teachers use the literature to inform their own practice.
4. Reflection and communication also essential scholarly elements.
The important of the scholarship is:
1. Give big impact on education.
2. Emphasis students learn performance.
3. Increase teaching status.
4. Enable teachers to teach more knowledgeably.
5. Provide a framework to assess teaching quality.
6. To teach better certain concept so students able to master that topic.
7. As a catalyst for curriculum changes in school education.

Pedagogical action research fit into the scholarship of teaching and learning because:
• Pedagogical action research has dual focus on practice and theory.
• It enables us to actively engage with the theoretical knowledge that underpins the scholarship of teaching and learning.
• Pedagogical action research is problem-based learning process.
• To immerse new teachers into the profession and enhance their professional growth.
• Pedagogical action research is a systematic process which required relevant literature to support relevant pedagogical theory.
• Need theoretical reflection to give new insights about teaching and learning.


Chapter 4: What is the case for pedagogical action research?
There are three types of action research:
1. Technical/technical-collaborative/scientific-technical/positivist
a. To test a particular intervention
b. Collaboration between the expert researcher and practitioners.
2. Mutual-collaborative/practical-deliberative-interpretivist perepective
a. To enable practitioners to interpret and thereby change their practice.
3. Enhancement approach/critical-emancipatory action research/critical science perspective
a. Focusing on understanding the social and political context.
b. Usually begin with a critique of theory based on practice experience.

Characteristics of action research:
1. Social practice
2. Aimed towards improvement of the individual students, curriculum, department, also policy and institution strategy.
3. Cyclical
a. Cycle of reflection, planning, acting, observing, reflecting and so on.
b. Since action research is interpretive, so further refinement need to be considered.
4. Systematic enquiry
5. Reflective
6. Participative
a. Participation form the other person may via electronic discussion, mail, comment, workshop and research seminar.
7. Determined by the practitioners
a. Decide relevant topic driven from a problem or an issue to improve or address it.

Purposes of doing action research:
• Train teacher analyzing their own practice.
• Train teacher analyzing their research methods and expertise.
• An aid to reflective thinking.
• A support for professional efficacy.
• To challenge current belief, concept and theories.
• To improve student learning experience and their academic performance.
• To understand process of teaching and learning.
• As a method for professional development.
• To enhance the quality of teaching and learning.
• To induct new professionals.

Chapter 5: Where do you start a pedagogical action research study?
Kurt Lewis proposed a series of steps composed of planning, action and fact finding about the result of the action taken. Another action research cycle is starting from observing, planning, acting to carry out the change and reflecting to evaluate the effect of the improvement/change that had been made. Typically, there are more than one cycle will be used, depends on the situation. A simple process that proposed by Norton (2009) for carrying out action research starting from identifying a problem, then thinking of ways to address the problem, doing it by taking an action, evaluate our action and lastly modify if there any ameliorate need to be done.

Chapter 6: What are the most suitable research methodologies?
Before starting our research, it is important to know about a research protocol. Research protocol is a guideline in writing our research. Here is the format for writing a research protocol:
1. Front page with the full title, a version number, the date and contact details of research teams.
2. Description of proposed research
a. Summary of the aim, significance, design and proposed methodology.
3. Theoretical background
a. Critical review of the current research literature.
4. Research methodology
a. Justify proposed method.
b. Outline any potential methodological difficulties and plans for addressing them.
c. Also include the type of design to be used, materials whether qualitative or quantitative data, sample and procedure.
5. Analysis of data
a. Outline statistical test will be used in the research.
6. Timetable
7. Dissemination plans
a. Outline research outcome which might benefit students, policy, practice and so on
8. Continuation plans
a. Effect of research findings whether can modify practice or not.
b. Outline the next cycle of action research.
9. References

Questionnaire and interview is common types of data gathering methods. There are three main types of question used in questionnaires; open-ended questions, closed questions and attitude scales, while types of interview are structured interview where the questions are predetermined, semi-structured interviews with predetermined questions but are more flexible and lastly unstructured interviews which required very long time.

When researcher decide to use experimental design to test the sample, independent group design, match participants design and repeated measures design can be used. Independent group design involves two main groups, independent group and control group. Dependant variable needed to be focused so that an appropriate measure of effect is formulated. In order to test a hypothesis whether accepted or not, statistical analysis needed to be performed. Matched participants design is used when researcher want to match the variables. Repeated measures design used when the same participants are measured twice. Unfortunately, there are possibilities where participants tend to improve with practice. So, the result will be not valid.

Observational research is used to find out the effects of an intervention. Thus, we have to look into behavior, the person who make an observation and recorded method. There are three types of observation can be used; direct, naturalistic and participant observation (direct or naturalistic). Process involve is continuous mentoring, time sampling where we set the time systematically and event sampling where we only record specific interested behavior.

Correlation studies or correlation research is a statistical technique to show the relationship between two independent categories/variables. This relationship can be positive, which mean high score in one variable related to a high score in the other variable, and negative relationship, which mean high score in one variable related to a low score in the other variable. There also will be no relationship between tested variables.


Chapter 7: How can you analyse qualitative data in pedagogical action research?
There are many types of qualitative analysis, such as grounded theory, discourse analysis, semiotics, thematic analysis and content analysis. Thematic analysis is to search for patterns. Stage involve in this type of analysis (thematic analysis) as mentioned below:
Stage 1: Immersion
Stage 2: Generating categories
Stage 3: Deleting categories
Stage 4: Merging categories
Stage 5: Checking themes
Stage 6: Linking themes
Stage 7: Presentation research findings

Stage involve in content analysis as mentioned below:
Stage 1: Deciding on the unit of analysis
Stage 2: Dividing transcript into units of analysis
Stage 3: Construct categories
Stage 4: Assign units of analysis to categories
Stage 5: Calculate the percentage of information units that fall into each category


Chapter 8: How can you analyse quantitative data in pedagogical action research?
Quantitative analysis is important where the method is an experiment, an attitude scale or questionnaire, an observation study which involves counting and data contain information that is quantifiable. There are two types statistical analysis fall into this category; descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.

Descriptive analysis is used to present data in an easy way. It includes measures of central tendency or averages (mean, median and mode), measures of dispersion or variability (range, mean deviation and standard deviation) and frequency counts.

Inferential statistics is used to draw some conclusion from the data that had been collected. Usually, it is used to test a hypothesis. There are three types of inferential statistics; test for correlations, test for differences in means and test for goodness of fit. For correlation test, we usually use Spearman’s rho and Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient. For test of differences for repeated measures (paired variables), we usually use the sign test (S), Wilcoxon matched pairs test and Student’s t-test. For test of differences for independent groups, the Mann-Whitney U test will be used. For test of goodness of fit, Chi-square will be used.

Chapter 10: What are the ethical issues involved in pedagogical action research?
The fundamental principle of ethical research is to inform consent, privacy and confidentiality and to protect from harm. Acting ethically involves making some careful and considered decisions at the research design state, as well as in seeking formal ethical approval from our relevant instructional department.