This is the end of three articles that, when taken together, add up to a series of steps through which you will engage in in-depth analysis to improve your final report on any action research project you have undertaken. At the end of your action research project, or even as a mid-way formative assessment, it is helpful for you to stop and reflect on how far you have come and whether it is in line with the original purpose for starting the project. This article is the third of three and helps you chart your measurable actions so that others can follow your process and be informed by your findings and results. Whether that new incarnation of work is compelling or important to others, and to what extent, has a lot to do with how deeply you answer the question, “How do I know what I did?”
Chart your measurable actions
Now that the work is done, you can plot it on a timeline or graph. The lower left corner is where you started or your baseline, which you measured at the time in some detail. In regular increments, your project moved over time, in many cases also evolving upward from the baseline. By reading your weekly reflection protocols and their measurable actions section, you can complete a chart or graph that visually shows the progress of your work. If you put your purpose, or the result you hoped to achieve, in the upper right corner you will have a graphical display of how you see the results of your work compared to what you expected at the beginning.
Together, these three processes should help you do two things. First, you need to be able to separate your personal and professional results and move to a higher level of neutrality in your reporting. Second, you need to understand from a neutral stance whether you will report: small success, great success, or failure. Now you know what your report will say, what remains is to weave the evidence you have into a compelling story that correctly shows your results to your stakeholders.
How do I analyze my work as data?
Like alchemy, analysis is a cumulative process, one that cannot be completed without the “right” ingredients. At the end of the project, professionals must demonstrate that the opinions they have formed about the legitimacy of their results are logical and accurate, as a natural result of the data collected during the process. Hopefully, you have already considered the types of information you would need for your particular stakeholder group and made sure to collect that information throughout your project. Using your reflective notes, along with the evidence you collected (and analyzed in the first two processes discussed in previous articles) during your measurable action steps, makes the final stage of this process less overwhelming. Your findings are developed from cumulative records of all the data collected during the course of your project.
Now a deeper analysis is required as a researcher. Again, lay out all your thoughtful data week after week, side by side, but this time also group around other data or evidence that will support or add to your final report. These can include surveys, interview data, etc. What you have in front of you is a graphical representation of all the bits and pieces that you can use to build your final report.
Some researchers will find that when they expose all the evidence they have, they can see areas around which they don’t have enough evidence yet. Therefore, rapid activity may be necessary to shore up the obviously weak parts. Before writing your final report, you should have substantiated evidence for each lesson that has emerged from your work. These lessons are known in the research world as findings. And the findings need to be backed up with data.
The conclusions are developed from your findings. At the end of any investigation, the investigator sits down and asks, “What does all this mean? What is its significance? What would my message be to others?” Analysis, if done right, naturally takes you through your data to your findings and then, with a little thought, to your conclusions.
The following exercise was published in our first book, and students reported that it was critical to their success in reporting data as findings and moving to conclusions:
1. Sort your data into categories of “lessons learned” or results that you can claim. These will be your findings.
2. List under each category the data that confirms that lesson. Also list any data that refutes this claim.
3. Sort the categories. The top should be the lesson that has the most confirmation and the least disproving data.
4. If you worked in a group, discuss with them whether your ranking order and your findings match what they would consider important.
5. Decide if you (and your team members if they are in a group) met or exceeded the purpose. How do specific categories (or not) add to your achievement of your research purpose?
6. Reflect and ask yourself: What does all this mean? What is the meaning of this? What would my message be to others?
7. Write some concluding statements from the answers to these questions.
8. Describe the most logical way to discuss the progression from your categorical findings to your conclusions.
This is likely to end up in some kind of chart or graphic organizer that you’ve jotted down your thoughts on. You are now ready to write or present what you have learned. Before you start writing, you need to analyze whether and to what extent you can justify your project as a success. That will be covered in our fourth article in this series. Then, as you write, it helps to know and understand what standards you need to meet in order to convince others. That is the subject of the fifth article. Research practice is typically measured against standards of validity, credibility, and reliability. These together can argue that your findings and conclusions are correct and your report becomes convincing to your audience.
