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Comment A 

One of the common forms of qualitative data that action researchers analyze is interview data, most commonly in the form of a transcript from the audio recording of the interview. To analyze the data collected from student interviews, I will analyze the interview transcript by carefully reading the transcript to identify broad themes emerging from the data that will help answer my research questions. This in-depth, intimate knowledge and examination of the data will allow me to categorize themes and ideas that will contribute to my understanding of the phenomenon under investigation, and possibly I can find answers to the research questions. The following are guideposts for analyzing data: identify themes, develop a coding scheme, code the data, and finally sort the data by themes (or codes) (Mills, 2018).

Concepts maps are a useful strategy that helps action research participants visualize the major influences that have affected the study (Stringer, 1996, as cited in Mills, 2018). For example, what were the perspectives of the students? Parents? Teachers? Administrators? A concept map gives participants an opportunity to display their analysis of the problem and to determine consistencies and inconsistencies that may exist between the disparate groups. The steps for developing a concept map include the following: 

1. List the major influences that have affected the study of your area of focus. 

2. Develop a visual representation of the major influences (factors) connecting the influences with relationships you know exist (using solid lines) and influences you have a “hunch” about (using dotted lines).

3. Review the concept map to determine any consistencies or inconsistencies that exist among the influences. This forces you back to your data to see “what’s missing”.  

Connecting the data with personal experiences is appropriate because action research is about the teacher researcher's personal teaching practices. The teacher researchers know the study better than anyone else; after all, they have done it in their classroom or school and focused on their students. Interpretations are based on intimate knowledge and understandings of one's school, classroom, teaching, and learning (Mills, 2018). The Highland Park teachers used their prior knowledge of the school's grading system, their students, and their personal grading practices to interpret the data. A second technique for data interpretation involves critical friends. Trusted colleagues may provide the teacher researcher important insights that might have been originally missed. Critical friends may also ask questions about the data that assist the teacher researcher to further clarify the findings. These colleagues may be people that teacher researcher has never met face-to-face but with whom he/she has talked in action research chat rooms on the Internet. Similarly, the teacher researcher may ask their informants (students, parents, teachers, and administrators) for their insights (Mills, 2018). The Highland Park teachers worked as a research team to conduct their action research study. The study's data was interpreted from the team's multiple perspectives.

 

Comment J

 Mills (2014) discusses the importance of data collection and analysis using an example from Fagel et al. at Highland Park High School. The action researchers in this case decided to do an experiment in how student outcomes changed upon the elimination of numerical grades in the regular evaluations. Among the outcomes that they wanted to assess was the students’ attitudes towards learning, how the elimination of numerical grades affected teaching, how student self-assessment affects achievement, and how teaching might be enriched by deemphasizing grades. While the project sounds outstanding and ambitious, successfully completing such an endeavor would be impossible without rigorous data collection and analysis. In the Highland Park High School study, the researcher used a number of instruments to collect data, including quantitative data from surveys given to teachers and students, and final year evaluation grades. In addition, the researchers used qualitative data from interviews with children and teachers to evaluate the results of their action research intervention.

In the case of the action research project I have proposed, data collection is complicated by the fact that the child I will be working with, who is 8 years old and diagnosed with ASD, is nonverbal. As Hellendoorn et al. (2015) and Geschwind & Levitt (2007) have noted, working with children who are nonverbal and diagnosed with ASD requires a number of special considerations due to the lack of verbal communication. As such, how I shall evaluate the results of my research will have to be modified to circumvent the fact that I cannot used data from qualitative or quantitative surveys or interviews with the child. Instead, I will have to take certain steps to design alternative data collection methods and record them. For example, the first step might be to design and decide on the instrument for data collection. One example is the needs assessment, which is a data collection instrument designed for the parents to complete in an interview with me. The second major step is to ensure that the parents’ answers and any pertinent notes are carefully recorded. Next, a framework for following up will have to be decided upon. In other words, a data collection tool will be decided upon for evaluating whether or not the action research intervention was successful. Finally, the main step in evaluation will be comparing the data from the last evaluation and comparing it to data from the original. Concept mapping is the idea of using some main concepts or topics in order to organize the data that will be collected and evaluated.  For example, rather than being vague about what is being sought after in the data collection, the idea would be to come up with specific concepts such as parental observations of progress, teacher progress observations, or child responsiveness scales. From there, it will be easier to measure whether or not the intervention has been successful thanks to the compartmentalized data collection and analysis that, when combined, answers to the overall research question.

In the case of the Highland Park action research study, the researchers mixed qualitative and quantitative data to connect their findings with their personal experience, combining the collection of grades with the collection of qualitative surveys. In addition, they took advantage of contact and dialogue with their peers in order to receive advice and feedback on their research. This allowed them to put their study into perspective and ensure that their research questions were worth answering, and if so, whether or not they were pursuing them correctly. Furthermore, using critical friends is a process that allows the action researcher to enrich their research by getting valuable feedback and creative inspiration