Chulapol Thanomsing
EDCI 606 Topic 3 Assignment
Action Research Paper

A reflective teachers must be able to use the fundamentals of research, which are observing, reflecting, and adjusting, as guides to enhance her/his teaching level of effectiveness.  To become an action researcher, a reflective teacher must be able to utilize the action research process to increase the validity of her/his conclusions.

After reading the text, “Teachers as Reflective Practitioners and Action Researcher,” I truly believe that action research is a useful tool to improve the quality of teaching and learning, and an organization and its performance.  Action research also gives reflective teachers new opportunities to explore or test new ideas, methods, and materials; to reflect on or assess their teaching; and to be able to make decisions about new approaches.  According to Sagor, 2000, the primary for action research is to assist the “actor” in improving and/or refining her/his actions.

Typically, action research is a systematic process of observing, collecting, and analyzing is quantitative or qualitative in nature.  Both quantitative and qualitative methods can provide useful information for describing, understanding, and explaining teaching method.  No method is better than the other.  They both have advantages and limitations.  They both can also help action researchers answer hypothesis and research questions.  To compare which method should be chosen, researchers have to answer some questions such as which method can provide valuable information about research and which method will increase the validity and reliability of the data.  To do so, researchers must understand the differences between those two methods.

Seeking the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods, researchers should understand theoretical foundations and approaches in those two methods.  In the quantitative method, the theoretical foundation is called “logical positivism” (Phillips, 1987).  Researchers in quantitative method would analyze the information that could be measured and observed.  On the other hand, qualitative researchers would use “phenomenological foundation” (Mason & Bramble, 1997) to understand study as part of a whole by affecting the environment in which the phenomenon occurs.  For example, if  a marketing research department would like to explore about “the relation between shipping time and annual sales,” it should be done by quantitative research.  Period time of shipping and annual sales data can be observed and measured.  But if the research is “the effect of sale’s procedures to annual sales,” researchers should be concerned as past of a whole sale’s procedures by using qualitative method.

Comparing the two methods in terms of approaches, the role of the researcher, the nature of data reported, the definition of valid study, and the type of data collected must be considered.  The role of quantitative researcher is objective.  In the same example, researchers would measure and/or observe only shipping time and annual sales.  In the case of the effect of sales procedures to annual sales, the role of qualitative researcher is subjective.  She/he would involve in study by asking some customers about their feelings on sale’s procedures.  For the nature of data reported, quantitative method is inclined to be deductive and to test theory.  In this issue, researchers may test the hypothesis that is “customers usually cancel their orders, if they could not receive products within 2 days.”  On the other hand, the hypothesis in qualitative method may be “most of customers would be able to wait more than 2 days, if our sale’s procedures could tell them when products are coming.”  So, it means that qualitative method tends to be inductive and to generate theory.

Comparing about the definition of valid study, shipping time and sales data in quantitative method can easily be generalized.  But it is really hard if qualitative researchers generalize the feeling of customers to sale’s procedures.  Feelings also may change depending on their particular set of circumstances.  Lastly, the type of data collected in quantitative method is numbers such as how long customers have to wait.  On the other hand, the feelings of customers about sales procedures are gathered in words.  The table below will show the conclusion about the differences between quantitative and qualitative method.

	Quantitative Method	Qualitative Method	
Theoretical Foundation	
	Logical Positivism	Phenomenological Foundation	
Approaches	
The role of the researcher	Objective	Subjective	
The nature of data reported	Deductive	Inductive	
The definition of valid study	Generalisable	Not generalisable	
The type of data collected	Numbers	Words