Action Research in Teaching and Learning

A Practical Guide to Conducting Pedagogical Research in Universities

Lin Norton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138551459
• eBook ISBN: 9781351376051
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Practical and down-to-earth, the second edition of Action Research in Teaching and Learning is an ideal introduction to the subject, offering a distinctive blend of the theoretical and the practical, grounded firmly in the global higher education landscape. Written in an accessible style to build confidence, it provides easily adaptable, practical frameworks, guidelines and advice on research practice within a higher education context.

The reader is guided through each stage of the action research process, from engaging with the critical theory, to the practical applications with the ultimate goal of providing a research study which is publishable. Supplemented by useful pedagogical research tools and exemplars of both qualitative and quantitative action research studies, this new edition features chapters engaging with teaching excellence and analysing qualitative and quantitative research, additions to the resources section and a new preface focusing more explicitly on the ever-growing number of part-time academics.

Action Research in Teaching and Learning combines a theoretical understanding of the scholarly literature with practical applications and is an essential, critical read for any individual teaching or undertaking action research.

Chapter 1

What does doing pedagogical action research mean in the current higher education context?

Introduction

In this chapter I begin with a brief consideration of what pedagogical action research entails. I follow this by exploring the context that we work in and how this might affect our decision to carry out some form of pedagogical action research study. I use a personal example of my early research that will show how we can make significant pedagogical changes even if we start from fairly humble beginnings.

What is pedagogical action research (PedAR)?

Pedagogical action research involves using a reflective lens through which to look at some pedagogical issue or problem and methodically working out a series of steps to take action to deal with that issue. The fundamental purpose of pedagogical action research is to systematically investigate our own teaching/learning facilitation practice with the dual aim of modifying practice and contributing to theoretical knowledge.

A personal anecdote

Many years ago when I was a new psychology lecturer, initially appointed on a one-year contract, I was full of enthusiasm and love for the discipline. At the same time, having struggled myself as a mature student, I was keen to help the students I taught to avoid some of the pitfalls that I had encountered; the main one being that simply working hard is not enough to guarantee academic success. You need to also work in the ‘right way’. My own lightbulb moment about the ‘right way’ came when I realized that an academic degree requires independent thinking rather than faithfully reproducing others’ views. Although I did not know it at the time, I had stumbled on the difference between a surface and a deep approach to learning (Marton and Säljö, 1976).

This personal learning experience fuelled a lifetime commitment to helping students to learn. Although I cannot remember the exact chronology, it was fairly early on in my academic career as a lecturer that with the help of an enthusiastic colleague I ran an ‘Approaches to Learning’ programme for first-year psychology students. We developed this initiative from an earlier workshop programme designed to help students understand what was required of them in studying psychology at degree level. Its aim was to raise students’ metacognitive awareness of their own learning processes and actively encourage them to take a deep approach to their psychology studies. The effectiveness of the programme was reported in a journal paper and a book of conference proceedings (Norton and Crowley, 1995; Norton and Dickins, 1995).

As well as the formal dissemination, we also presented our project in seminars to colleagues within our institution. This led to my collaborating with a colleague from theology, who ran a similar programme and together we produced a tutor pack to help colleagues in other disciplines teach in a way that encouraged students to take a deep approach to their learning (Norton and Scantlebury, 1995). Reflecting on this undertaking, I can see how one small step motivated by my own student experience led to many more steps and how the whole process became widespread across the institution.

Because of this experience, I am a great believer in taking small steps and seeing where they lead us. This can be really effective for all of us who are new to pedagogical action research, no matter what stage of our academic career we are at. All we require to begin is an interest in how students learn and a readiness to explore and reflect on the effects of our teaching and assessment practices. How students learn is not, however, straightforward. It needs to be seen in terms of our students’ characteristics and the higher education context in which we operate.

Student profiles

The profile and number of university students has dramatically changed over recent years across the globe. The British Council’s analysis (2012) of higher education global trends indicates the fast-paced growth in international enrolments in the UK. There is also an increasing number of mobile students who choose to study at higher education institutions in countries other than their own. This has significant implications for how we teach our students, as a significant and increasing percentage will come from different countries. We need to think beyond the language challenges they may face. Providing courses in English for academic purposes is one response but it does little to help those from an educational background where the learning environment is quite different. International students may have experienced very different teaching approaches and be unfamiliar with their chosen university’s assessment requirements (Cook and Norton, forthcoming).

There is also the issue of diversity. This comes in many forms and would include characteristics such as age at entry, gender, sexual orientation, culture, ethnicity, religious beliefs, disability, work commitments and family responsibilities. Each of these categories implies further variability rather than any homogeneity. This growing awareness of the changing make-up of the student body suggests that more needs to be done in terms of the inclusivity of our teaching (see for example Gibson, 2015; Hockings, 2010; Mountford-Zimdars, 2015). I found these three references on a useful site provided by Plymouth University (n.d.) on inclusive teaching and learning research that suggests resources, research and reports for several specific groups of students.

Students as adult learners

More generally, when thinking about our students it might be helpful to consider the characteristics of adult learners. Malcolm Knowles was an American educator who was credited in the early 1970s with arguing that adults and children learn differently. In his theory of adult learning that he called andragogy, he made five assumptions about the characteristics of adult learners in terms of their:

1. self-concept which moves more towards being self-directed;
2. experience, which is described as a ‘growing reservoir’ that becomes their resource for learning;
3. readiness to learn that becomes orientated to the developmental tasks of their social roles;
4. orientation to learning that shifts from subject-centeredness to problem-centeredness;
5. motivation to learn that becomes internal.

Knowles has written extensively on the adult learner and principles for effective teaching (see for example Knowles, 1970, 1973, 1980, 1984). His work, although critiqued, has been widely used in various educational settings as well as in business and training areas. From our perspective his work is useful as it encourages us to think about teaching that is more active and experiential to align with the learning needs of our students.

All university students are adult learners, but those who are defined as mature (being 21 or over with a gap between school and university) face additional hurdles in being successful at their studies. A South African study by Abrahams (2014) illuminates some of the challenges they may face. He was interested in the trajectories and transitions in higher education of what he called working students. As part of a larger action research study, he interviewed a sample of part-time students in political studies. One of his main findings suggested that universities’ support for these students might be limited by a failure to understand their complex trajectories in higher education. Instead of a traditional linear transition into higher education usually demonstrated by traditional students, these mature students are more likely to have paths that are less linear and more complex, and may well stop and start. This study is just one example but it serves to highlight the need for more research to begin to understand mature students’ actual experiences. Knowing more about how our students approach their studies and what is important to them (not to us as teachers) could be the basis of such a pedagogical action research study, as illustrated in the following vignette:

Janet: assumptions about students

Janet was a high-flying Cambridge graduate, who found no difficulty in studying and who obtained a first-class degree in theology. Janet came from a public school background and although acutely aware of her own privileged circumstances, she was relatively unaware that students might struggle with learning. In her commitment to serve God, Janet decided to teach in a small theological college which offered degrees to mainly mature students from a wide variety of theological backgrounds and countries. Janet loved working with such a wide mix and felt genuinely inspired by their dedication to their calling but she was rather disappointed by the standard of work in their written assignments. Deciding that the problem was lack of practice in academic writing, she decided to incorporate writing sessions into the curriculum designed to help her students and was excited about her initiative. Discussing it with a colleague, she was surprised when he suggested that before embarking on a remedial course of action, it might be a better starting point to actually find out what her students thought their difficulties might be. She thought about his suggestion and decided to carry out an action research study, the first step of which was to hold focus groups and interviews with volunteer students. One of her initial findings from this cycle revealed that the students’ biggest challenge was taking the required academic critical approach to texts that they found sacred. Taking this as her starting point, Janet decided to read the literature about pedagogy in theology and thus informed, she intends to carry out a second cycle, in which she will hold seminars on the tensions between faith and an academic approach to study.

In this vignette, we can see how an action research approach helped Janet to see the difference between her own assumptions about her students’ difficulties and their actual experiences. While she thought the problem was a study skills issue, her students were experiencing the more fundamental stumbling block of critiquing sacred texts. This type of enquiry might well help Janet to reassess her own approach to enabling students to learn. Although this is a hypothetical example, it is founded in work I have done with theological academics who have raised similar issues. A more general observation of not taking account of the student perspective comes from my experiences of having sat in countless departmental meetings as well as many detailed curriculum planning meetings. A common thread in these events is that teams of staff are constantly theorizing about why and how students are performing or not performing to the level expected. It is very rare that even one student is present at such meetings, so we continue to make assumptions about them. An action research approach would ground such theorizing with some evidence. Recently, for example, there has been an encouraging move to involve students more as partners in all aspects of curriculum planning (Bovill, et al., 2016) and assessment (Deeley and Bovill, 2017). If we were also to involve the same students as collaborative action researchers we would have a sound basis for a pedagogical action research study.

Janet’s vignette is also an example of pedagogical action research which encourages us as academics to be reflective practitioners. This involves us engaging critically with the pedagogical literature. Action research contributes to reflective practice as we begin to conceptualize pedagogical issues as ‘wicked problems’. Ramaley (2014) coined this term to signify issues for which there are no simple, easy answers but many, each of which have value. In Janet’s case she realized that what she had thought was the problem was actually something else. By reading the literature and reflecting on the implications of the findings from her interviews, she may come up with not one potential solution but several. Testing solutions could form part of an ongoing action research cycle.

Points to ponder

1. Without thinking about it too much, write down five words or phrases that you would use to describe your students.

2. Looking at your list, what might this tell you about some of the assumptions you might make about students?

The higher education context

Universities are currently being forced to compete for students in a climate where the student is customer and the measures of quality are performance-based (Burke, Stevenson and Whelan, 2015). In this section, I will be looking at the issues around defining teaching excellence and how it can be demonstrated. I will also question whether or not there is a demonstrable link between excellent teaching and improved student learning. The introduction in the UK of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), in which the Government will be monitoring and assessing the quality of teaching in English universities, is the context in which I write. My argument is that while action research has an important role to play, we have to use it in a way that looks beyond the forces of techno-rationalism and metrics. Like McNiff (2016), I believe that those of us who work in higher education can use action research as a way to listen to other views as well as to critique our own approach. Biesta (2007) argues for research approaches that are thoughtful in engendering practices and beliefs that are ‘educationally desirable’ and driven by moral values. Fitzmaurice (2010) contends that the growing attention and focus on learning and teaching in higher education may push us to a concept of teaching that has been reduced to a set of competencies. Thinking of teaching as a professional practice enables us to move beyond a mechanistic view of teaching to a broader conception that ‘takes into account the complexity and contextuality of the work, and the importance of virtuous dispositions and caring endeavour in teaching.’ (p.54).

It is easy to feel somewhat disillusioned by the way that higher education appears to be going in the 21st century. The prevalence of market forces, accountability, metrics and increasing student consumerism are described by Brown with Carrasso (2013). Despite these drivers, we still retain a certain amount of relative autonomy (Darabi, Macaskill and Reidy, 2016). As this book is about pedagogical action research, I suggest that this is one approach we can use to exercise some autonomy in our own practice. To illustrate how this might work, I will use the ‘micro-meso-macro’ frame of reference, frequently used by researchers. Fanghanel (2007) described these levels in terms of filters in a higher education environment:

1. The micro level, meaning internal factors affecting the individual lecturer

2. The meso level, incorporating the department (or equivalent) and the subject discipline

3. The macro level, which includes the institution and external factors.

More recently Simmons (2016) has suggested there should also be a fourth level when looking at the impact of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in improving learning in Canada:

4. The mega level, meaning the provincial and national context.

When our students are not learning or performing as well as we would hope, it can be tempting to blame the rapidly-changing higher education context, or indeed students themselves. But this stance will not help to move us on in improving our practice so that our students have a better and more satisfying learning experience. Whether we are relatively new to university teaching, or have had many years of experience, the chances are that each of us will have identified some aspect of our students’ learning that we would like to change.

Consider, for a moment, the following three fictional examples:

1. Andreas is concerned about improving work placements for his engineering students (micro level).

2. Brendan and Barbara are working across departments to help students make links between the careers service and their degree programme (meso level).

3. Caroline is increasingly concerned about the real learning benefits of digital technologies in s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Ruth Balogh
• Preface to the second edition
• 1. What does doing pedagogical action research mean in the current higher education context?
• 2. Why is reflective practice important?
• 3. Why is the professionalization of university teaching important?
• 4. How can pedagogical action research contribute to career development?
• 5. Where do you start a pedagogical action research study?
• 6. What research methods should you choose?
• 7. How can you analyze qualitative data in pedagogical action research?
• 8. How can you analyze quantitative data in pedagogical action research?
• 9. How can you use pedagogical tools for your action research study?
• 10. What are the ethical issues involved in pedagogical action research?
• 11. Going public How can you grow the influence of your findings?
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index