Foundations Resources

Action research creates the opportunity to improve the lives of children and to learn about the craft of teaching.  As teacher researchers, those who engage in action research commit to a critical examination of classroom teaching principles and practices and the effects that teachers’ actions have on the children in their care. Watch the video below and explore the resources on this page to learn more.

Evidence-based refers to any concept or strategy that is derived from or informed by objective evidence—most commonly, educational research or metrics of school, teacher, and student performance. Research on evidence-based strategies suggests that these strategies impact student outcomes. Therefore, using such strategies will boost the probability of yielding positive student outcomes.

A strong action research question  should be meaningful, compelling, and important to you as a teacher-researcher. It should engage your passion and commitment as well as lead to taking action to improve an aspect of teaching and learning in your classroom.

As you implement your strategy, you will want to pay attention to how implementation is going. This is monitoring progress, an informal approach we take to determine what about an intervention is working and isn’t working for students. This will inform what we might need to tweak about implementation. 

One way for us to monitor progress is to administer formative assessments. You may be familiar with administering formative assessments for academic skills however formative assessments for social emotional skills may be different. Two key formative assessments that monitor social-emotional development are observations and behavior rating scales. 

Teachers use data sources that align with a given research question to gather summative data on students’ progress. To support this process please review the resources under the tabs Data Analysis and Relay Data Protocol.