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 undertaken. At the end of your action research project, or even as a formative assessment midway through, it is helpful to stop and reflect on how far you have come and whether or not it is in line with your original purpose for starting the project. This article is the third of three and helps you chart your measurable actions so others can follow your process and be informed by your findings and results. Whether and to what extent that new incarnation of work is compelling or important to others 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 job is done, you can plot it on a timeline or chart. The lower 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 evolving upward from the baseline. By reading your weekly reflective protocols and the measurable actions section of them, you can complete a chart or graph that visually shows the evolution of your work. If you put your purpose, or the result you hoped to achieve, in the upper right corner you will 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 his 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 big success, or a failure. He now knows what his report will say, what’s left is to weave the evidence he has into a compelling story that correctly portrays 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 “correct” ingredients. At the end of the project, practitioners must demonstrate that the opinions they have formed about the legitimacy of their results are logical and accurate, naturally derived 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 daunting. Your findings are developed from cumulative records of all data collected during 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 other data or evidence around it 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. So a quick flurry of activity may be needed to shore up parts that are obviously weak. Before writing the final report, you should have substantiated evidence of 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 your findings. At the end of any investigation, the researcher sits down and asks, “What does all this mean? What is its meaning? What would my message be to others?” Analysis, if done well, leads you naturally through your data to your findings and then, with a little 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 confirms that lesson. Also list any data that disproves this statement.
3. Rank the categories. 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 your rank order and your findings match what they would consider important.
5. Decide if you (and your team members if you are 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. Outline the most logical way to discuss the progression from your categorical findings to your conclusions.
This will likely end up in some sort of chart or graphic organizer where you have recorded your thoughts. You are now ready to write or present what you have learned. Before you start writing, you should consider 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 in order 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 argue that your findings and conclusions are correct and that your report becomes compelling to your audience.