5A1-9 - Program Evaluation - Analysis of Data Collection

WRITING AN ACTION RESEARCH DISSERTATION: PART ONE

INTRODUCTION Writing an action research dissertation may seem a formidable task. However, action research offers exciting prospects for expanding our understanding of the world around us and rich opportunities to be of service as academics and as professionals.

Any well-written dissertation will have much in common with other well-written pieces of academic writing including journal articles and research reports.

In Part One of this presentation, we'll talk about some factors related to success as an academic writer, and then in Part Two we'll apply what we've discussed to the task of writing an action research dissertation.

At the end of the first presentation, you'll be invited to explore links to academic writing tools. At the end of the second presentation, you'll be invited to explore links to academic journals that publish action research studies and university centers that conduct and share the results of action research. When you've explored those links, please share your ideas with your colleagues by responding to the discussion question in your courseroom.

ACADEMIC WRITING First, let's talk about academic writing generally.

Different kinds of writing are done differently and, when they're completed, have different characteristics.For example, writers of fiction or marketing materials are sometimes advised to, "Write the way we talk." However, that isn't good advice for academic writing.

LEVEL OF REDUNDANCY For one thing, spoken language contains a lot of redundancy, since the listener has to remember everything that has been said. That isn't the case with writing, of course, and academic writing has very little redundancy. As a result, it can seem to be particularly dense.

ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS Another example is that we tend to use a lot of adjectives and adverbs when we talk, but strong academic writing usually does not use a lot of them. A reason is that adjectives and adverbs tend to be imprecise. Words such as "big," "old," "important" and so forth are vague. You will be strongest when you are most precise.

THIS DISSERTATION A third example is that academic writers structure their sentences differently from the way they structure their sentences when they speak. Research shows when we speak we tend to build our sentences out of a lot of pairs of subjects and verbs — that is, our sentences tend to have a lot of clauses. For example, someone might say "I told him that Jane thought that he needed a car."

SPEECH That sentence contains three clauses. The first clause has "I" as the subject and "told" as the verb, the second clause has "Jane" as the subject and "thought" as the verb, and the third clause has "he" as the subject and "needed" as the verb.

ACADEMIC WRITING Experienced academic writers rarely write sentences that string together a sequence of subjects and verbs in that way. Instead, they tend to create sentences that have one subject and one verb, with a lot of phrases related to the subject and verb. "Poverty in the home, regardless of the level of education of the parents, causes poor performance in middle school and increased dropout rates over time." The first sentence, "I told him that Jane thought that he needed a car," is only 11 words long but has three pairs of subjects and verbs. The second sentence, "Poverty in the home, regardless of the level of education of the parents, causes poor performance in middle school and increased dropout rates over time," is much longer, with 25 words, but has only one subject and verb.

You don't have to be an expert in grammar to succeed as an academic writer. In fact, probably very few, if any, academic writers would be aware that they were making this shift in sentence structure. However, this example illustrates that in learning to be an academic writer, you are learning to write in a new register that differs from the ways in which you may be used to using language. One way to shepherd yourself into the kinds of sentences and overall style used in your specific academic area is to read high-quality pieces of academic writing in your area and pay attention to the ways in which language is used. Over time, you'll become used to these specific uses of language.

STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS All of us have strengths and weaknesses, and in academic writing, as in other areas of life, our strengths and weaknesses will end up to be systematic. This is a reason that if a teacher goes through your paper and does line-by-line editing, marking all of your mistakes, research does not show that this will necessarily lead to learning. What most often happens in those cases is that learners don't take time to go through all of those edits. Instead, being normal people, we tend to just go on to the next assignment.

On the other hand, if a teacher identifies categories of your strengths and weaknesses, that empowers you going forward because then you will be able to work to improve in your weak areas, and protect your areas of strength. Both of these are important, because as you make changes to improve your weaknesses, you may accidentally lose some of your strengths without knowing it. Knowing what your strengths are will help you to protect them. The links provided to you at the end of this presentation will give you the tools and skills you need to accomplish this.

WRITING FEEDBACK As a start, you'll be introduced to Capella's Personal Writing Assessment Tool and Writing Feedback Tool.

MEAL PLAN You'll also learn about two Writing Program resources that are particularly useful in dissertation writing: Reverse Outlining and the MEAL PLAN.

Let me say a word about Reverse Outlining. This simply means that you write a draft and then outline what you've written. This isn't as easy as it sounds, because you have to outline what you actually wrote, not what you wished you had written. As soon as you begin to reverse outline something you've written, you will trick your mind into seeing your writing differently, and your mind will say, "Oh, I thought I had three major divisions but I only have two," or, "I have three divisions but I have 27 pages in the first one and only 2 pages in the second one."

This fact makes Reverse Outlining the best tool to use if your dissertation committee asks you to expand your review of literature, which sometimes happens. If you just look over your review of literature and say, "Oh, ok, I can write more about these two areas," you'll probably pick the two areas you already wrote too much about because you'll pick the areas you liked best or found easiest to research. If you use the Reverse Outlining process, you'll create a more balanced review of literature and save yourself a lot of revision time and frustration.

CONCLUSION Actually, this provides a good transition into the second part of this presentation, which is applying best practices of academic writing to the specific challenges of writing an action research dissertation.

Here are the links to key academic writing resources for you to reflect on as you watch the second media presentation:

Overview of the Writing Center: http://media.capella.edu/CourseMedia/XX7010/WritingCenterOverview/wrapper.asp

Academic Integrity: http://media.capella.edu/CourseMedia/DrPH8005/AcademicIntegrity/animation_wrapper.asp

Smarthinking: http://media.capella.edu/CourseMedia/DrPH8005/Smarthinking/smarthinking_wrapper.asp

Peer Review: http://media.capella.edu/CourseMedia/DrPH8005/PeerReview/animation_wrapper.asp

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