SGDP 4043

ACTION
RESEARCH IN
EDUCATION
DR. NUR HAZWANI ZAKARIA
School of Education
Universiti Utara Malaysia
Content
1.0 Introduction
1.1 History of Action Research
1.2 Action Research Development in
Malaysia
1.1
History of Action Research
• a particular intellectual and social tradition, the overviews provided

- practitioner research (Anderson, Herr and Nihlen,1994)

- action science (Argyris, Putnam & Smith, 1985)
- self-study (Bullough and Pinnegar, 2001)
- participatory rural appraisal (Chambers,1997)
- teacher research (Cochran-Smith and Lytle,1993)
- participatory action research (Fals Borda , 2002)
- action research (Greenwood and Levin, 1998)
- feminist participatory action research (Maguire, 1987)
• Some action research is group oriented
and some is individual oriented
• Some is done by those within the
setting and some is done by change
agents from outside the organization in
collaboration with insiders
• Some is highly participatory and some
is much less so
• Some see the goal of action research as
improving practice or developing
individuals, whereas others see its goal as
transforming practice and
participants.
How was it
started?
• Work of Kurt Lewin and the group-
dynamics movement of the 1940s.
• Lewin was not the first to use or advocate
action research, he was the first to develop
a theory of action research that made it a
respectable form of research in the social
sciences.
• Lewin believed that knowledge should be
created from problem solving in real-life
situations
• Among the problems he studied were those
related to production in factories and
discrimination against minority groups
(Lewin, 1946, 1948)

• During the late 1950s and 1960s, the human relations

movement evolved into the human resources school
• Action research's insistence on worker participation
played an important role in these movements but was
often used as a management technique to get worker
buy-in.
• However, it also had the potential to democratize
workplaces and heed Lewin's call for theory grounded
in local problem solving
Lewin's action research was taken up in the U.S. by
external consultants who set up controlled experiments
and measured results. This tradition of action research
was captured for over 40 years by a positivist approach
that manipulated isolated variables. Levin (1999)
speculates on why this trend occurred in the U.S.
 Why it was mainstream in US?
1. The strong professional norms within American academia
allowed little freedom to break out of
the barriers defined by positivistic social science.
2. Mainstream action research in the U.S.
was linked to businesses competing in the marketplace. It was
generally contracted and paid for by
companies.
In this context, action research soon became organizational
development work in which
the core interest was organizational change in support of a power
elite's interests. The research part
was subordinated to other goals and the open-ended inquiry
dimension disappeared. p. 26, Lewin (1999)
 Action Research In Education

Action research has enjoyed widespread

success, both as an individual route to
professional development and as a collaborative
route to professional and institutional change
action research has become so
popular in education, particularly
as a mode of professional
development and “data-based
decision making”
The idea of educational practitioners doing
research in schools goes back at least as far as the
late nineteenth
and early twentieth century with the movement
for the scientific study of education.
Teachers were viewed as
the front line of data gatherers for a massive
research movement that saw teachers as researchers,
working
scientifically in their classroom laboratories
(McKernan, 1988).
During the early 1950s, action research was
promoted in the field of education principally
by Corey (1949, 1953, 1954) at Columbia
Teachers College, who believed that teachers
would likely find the results of their own
research more useful than that of “outsiders”
and, thus, would be more likely to question
current curricular practices.
By the end of the 1950s, action research had not only
declined in the field of education but in the social
sciences as well.
Sanford (1970), in an article titled “Whatever Happened
to Action Research?” suggested that funding agencies
wanted more basic research and that an increasing split
between science and practice led to the cult of the expert
(Lindblom & Cohen, 1979) and the top-down, social
engineering mentality of the period
Two booklets that had a
powerful effect
 Kemmis and McTaggart's (1987) The
Action Research Planner, a user-
friendly introduction to the action
research spiral,
 Kemmis's (1982) The Action
Research Reader, a compilation of
critical action research studies.
1.2
Action Research
Development in
Malaysia
Unit Pembangunan
Pembudayaan Penyelidikan
Bahagian Perancangan dan Penyelidikan Dasar
Pendidikan (BPPDP)
Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia
(sejak 1993) dengan kerjasama Bahagian di
KPM & semua JPN
known
as
EPRD
 Projek BPPDP dengan International
BPG – kursus jangka Development Program (IDP), Australia.
pendek 41 orang pensyarah Dihadiri oleh 11 peserta: pegawai KPM, Kerjasama BPPDP
IPG:oleh Prof Stephen JPN, PPD dan guru sekolah. Penghasilan dengan Yayasan Guru
BPPDP – Projek Penyelidikan Modul Kajian Tindakan dengan kerjasama Tun Hussein Onn
Kemmis, Deakin University,
Pendidikan –Kerjasama Bank BPPDP, IDP dan USM. (YGHTO): Persidangan
Australia
Dunia: Programme for Penyelidikan KT
Innovation, Excellence and
Short course for 41 Research (PIER) EPRD project with IDP, 11
lecturers in Teachers’
participants: MOE officer, JPN,
Education Institute by EPRD-WORLD Collaboration
PPD and school teacher, Develop
Prof Stephen Kemmis, BANK EPRD with
AR Module, with partnership
Deakin Univiersity Collaboration for YGTHO in AR
EPRD, IDP and USM
PIER Conference

1993- 1994 1998- 2018-

1988 1990s 1996 1995 2000 2020

AR course in University of East Collaboration MOE-MOSTI: AR

Action Research becomes pre Anglia: 4 lecturers, 5 teachers, Course for Science and Maths
service course in Teachers’ 1 EPRD officer teachers
Education Institute Kursus KT di University of
East Anglia, England: 4 Kerjasama KPM- Kementerian
pensyarah IPG, 5 guru, 1 Sains, Teknologi dan Alam
pegawai BPPDP Sekitar (MOSTI): Kursus KT
KT sebagai kursus pra-
guru sains dan matematik
perkhidmatan di IPG
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