Analyzing Your Action Research: Step Three, Chart Your Measurable Actions

This is the last of three articles that, when taken together, add up to a series of steps through which you will engage in in-depth analysis to improve your final report on any action research project you have ever undertaken. At the end of your action research project, or even as a formative evaluation halfway through, it is useful to stop and reflect on how far you have come and whether or not it is in line with the original purpose for starting the project. This article is the third of three and helps you map out your measurable actions so that others can follow your process and be informed by your discoveries and results. Whether that new incarnation of the work is compelling or important to others, and to what extent, has a lot to do with how deeply you answer the question, “How do I know what I did?”

Chart your measurable actions

Now that the work is done, you can plot it on a timeline or graph. The bottom left corner is where you started or your baseline, which you measured at that time in some detail. In regular increments, your project moved over time, in many cases also moving up from the baseline. By reading your weekly reflective protocols and their measurable actions section, you can complete a chart or graph that visually shows how your work is progressing. If you put your purpose, or the result you hoped to achieve, in the upper right corner you’ll have a graphical display of how you see the results of your work compared to what you originally expected.

Taken together, these three processes should help you do two things. First, he must be able to separate his personal results from professional ones and move to a higher level of neutrality when reporting them. Second, he must understand from a neutral position whether he will report: a small success, a great success, or a failure. He now knows what his report will say, what remains is to weave the evidence he has into a compelling story that correctly displays his results to his stakeholders.

How do I analyze my work as data?

Like alchemy, analysis is a cumulative process, which cannot be completed without the “right” ingredients. At the end of the project, professionals must demonstrate that the opinions they have formed about the legitimacy of their results are logical and accurate, derived naturally from the data collected during the process. Hopefully you have already considered the types of information you would need for your particular set of stakeholders and have made sure to collect that information throughout your project. Using your reflective notes, along with the evidence you collected (and analyzed in the first two processes discussed in previous articles) during your measurable action steps makes the final stage of this process less overwhelming. Your findings are developed from cumulative records of all data collected over the course of your project.

Now a deeper analysis is required as a researcher. Once again, present all of your reflective data week by week side by side, but this time also group around it other data or evidence that will corroborate or add to your final report. These may include surveys, interview data, etc. What you have in front of you is a graphical representation of all the snippets that you can use to create your final report.

Some researchers will find that when they present all the evidence they have, they can see areas around which they don’t yet have enough evidence. Therefore, a quick burst of activity may be necessary to shore up parts that are obviously weak. Before you write the final report, you should have substantiated evidence for each lesson that has emerged from your work. These lessons are known in the research world as findings. And the findings need to be backed up with data.

Conclusions are developed from their findings. At the end of any investigation, the investigator sits down and asks, “What does all this mean? What is its significance? What would be my message to others?” Analysis, if done well, naturally leads you through your data to your findings and then, with some thought, to your conclusions.

The following exercise was published in our first book, and students reported that it was critical to their success in reporting data as findings and reaching conclusions:

1. Sort your data into categories of “lessons learned” or results you can claim. These will be your findings.

2. List under each category the data that supports that lesson. Also list any data that refutes this claim.

3. Sort the categories by rank. The top should be the lesson that has the most confirmation and the least amount of refuted data.

4. If you worked in a group, discuss with them whether their ranking order and their findings match what they would consider important.

5. Decide if you (and your team members if in a group) met or exceeded the purpose. How do the specific categories add (or not) to your achievement of your research purpose?

6. Reflect and ask yourself: What does all this mean? What is the meaning of this? What would be my message to others?

7. Write some concluding statements from the answers to those questions.

8. Summarize the most logical way to discuss the progression from your categorical findings to your conclusions.

This will likely end up in some kind of outline or graphic organizer where you have recorded your thoughts. Now you are ready to write or present what you have learned. Before you start writing, you need to analyze whether and to what extent you can justify your project as a success. That will be covered in our fourth article in this series. Then, as you write, it helps to know and understand what standards you need to meet to be convincing to others. That is the object of the fifth article. Research practice is generally measured against standards of validity, credibility, and reliability. These together can make the argument that your findings and conclusions are correct and your report becomes convincing to your audience.