Educational Research Methods
A site to support teaching and learning...
Action Research
in the Professions
Action research is a research methodology (a type of research strategy) that can incorporate a range of different data collection and analysis techniques. Action research has become very popular in professional fields such as education, nursing, counselling…
“Action research has the potential to advance the field of counseling by creating a pathway for resolving the long-standing disconnect between research and practice within the counseling profession. The results of action research are relevant to practitioners and easily translated into practice because the questions that action researchers pose are generated by the practitioners themselves. In addition, counseling practitioners are advantaged as action researchers because the requisite skills and values that inform quality action research, including creativity, reflexivity, the ethics of relationship power differentials, and advocacy for vulnerable clients, are central features of their clinical training. Action research, therefore, provides potential for counselors to produce a body of literature that is tailored to the unique needs of counselors and is consistent with the counseling field's developmental, ecological, multicultural, and advocacy-based traditions.” Guiffrida, et al., 2011
Guiffrida, D. A., Douthit, K. Z., Lynch, M. F., & Mackie, K. L. (2011). Publishing action research in counseling journals. Journal of Counseling and Development, 89(3), 282-287.
This is a personal site of Keith S. Taber to support teaching of educational research methods.
(Dr Keith Taber is Professor of Science Education at the University of Cambridge.)
2015-2019
