A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

1%
63%
36%

---

 
What do I find? | 
63
Task 6.5 @
In the story of another Champion Teacher, Daniela (6.1 above), we saw some of her qualitative and quantitative data.
Like Lorena, she also used tables to organise some of the quantitative data to make it easier to interpret.
For example, in her questionnaire, Daniela asked the question; ‘In class, what is the percentage you understand?’.
She counted the numbers of students selecting different percentages, put this into a table and summarised the qualitative 
responses she also got on the right. Try turning the quantitative data into a bar chart, then check in the answer key.
What do you notice? What are the peaks? Daniela’s research 
question was ‘How much do students understand in class?’ 
How do you think she interprets the findings above, in the 
light of this question? 
Commentary
We can notice many things from this data. From the 
teacher’s perspective, it’s generally good news. The majority 
of the students can understand most of what the teacher 
says, and may be learning well from trying to understand 
what they don’t know. However, there are two ‘peaks’ in the 
data. As well as the biggest peak at 80–90%, there is also a 
peak at 40–50%. Notice how converting the data into a chart 
made this clearer, and is likely to help Daniela think about the 
issue, what problems there may be in this class, and even 
potential solutions.
Now let’s see another example of this with another 
Champion Teacher, Javier Ávalos. Read about the problems 
Javier found with learner motivation in his class. 
“I did my research in a public school for adults and 
youngsters (between 16 and 60) who had dropped out of 
schools for different reasons. When I started teaching them 
I noticed their faces sometimes looked scared and/or quiet 
when we talked about English. They seemed to be not 
frightened of me, but of English itself. Then I noticed that 
they have a very low level in the language. ‘Can they learn 
English if they are afraid of it?’, I wondered. I did some tests 
and noticed they had weak grades. So, I began to ask my 
students randomly: ‘What were their feelings about 
English?’ ‘Why did they think that they can’t learn English?’ 
‘Were they comfortable or confident with learning the 
language?’ I took some notes. While some students were 
happy, others with more difficulties in English said things 
like ‘I don’t understand English’, ‘I don’t care about English. 
It’s useless’, ‘We are in Chile and we speak Spanish’, ‘I feel 
ashamed in English because I think that I do it wrongly’.
I decided to create a survey to find out more.”