A handbook for Exploratory Action Research

Task 5.4
Focus
Kind of data
A. Exploring your 
own perceptions
1. Your own written reflections 
and/or notes
2. Other’s people’s written ideas 
on the topic
3. Notes from informal 
conversations with colleagues
B. Exploring
others’ perceptions
4. Reflective writing by students
5. Notes or recordings of focus 
group discussions
6. Notes or recordings
of interviews/chats with 
individuals
7. Responses to a questionnaire
C. Exploring 
behaviour
(including 
performance)
8. Lessons plans and materials
9. Lesson recordings
10. A critical friend’s notes about 
your lesson
11. Pictures of your class
12. Students’ performance on 
tasks (written or recorded)

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Extra material | 
103
Answer Key
Chapter 5 
Task 5.5
Teacher
Research question
Kind(s) of data
Mauro
1. How do my students behave when they are 
sitting individually?
■
■
Recording of a lesson
■
■
A critical friend’s notes about lesson
2. How does the seating arrangement affect 
individual work?
■
■
Recording of a lesson
■
■
A critical friend’s notes about lesson
3. How do students feel about individual work?
■
■
Responses to questionnaire
Task 5.6
Task 5.7
One way of doing this would be to start with the reflective 
writing, followed by the questionnaire, and then the focus 
group discussion.
The reflective writing will provide you with some of the 
issues that the students who don’t like homework have
with it (e.g. ‘It’s boring’ ‘I don’t have time.’ ‘I find it too 
difficult to do on my own’, etc.). This will help you to put 
together a questionnaire that you can then use to work
out how common these issues are (See the example below).
Note that the statements in the left hand column in the 
questionnaire can come directly from what students have 
written in their reflective writing – you don’t need to spend 
a lot of time thinking up ‘good’ statements. Once you have 
identified the most common issues from students’ 
questionnaire responses, you can use the focus group 
discussion to find out why these issues are present, and 
whether the students have any suggestions that will help 
you to get them to do their homework better in the future.
Example questionnaire items: