You and Your Action Research Project (PDF)

7 Monitoring and documenting the action (p. 99-100)

This chapter gives advice on monitoring the action and documenting the processes of action research. It contains the following sections:

• How to monitor and document your action research: general principles
• Gathering data and looking for evidence
• How to manage the data: general principles
• How to involve other people in the monitoring process

How to monitor and document your action research: general principles

Your action is at the centre of your action research. It is not just any kind of action, but action to which you, the researcher, are committed by your personal and professional values, action that is informed by your careful considerations about its appropriateness, and action that is intentional and undertaken by you to achieve the goals you have set. Monitoring the action should help you to meet these high principles.

Collecting, interpreting and evaluating your data

Monitoring the action is more complicated than simply collecting data about how you perform an aspect of your work. It involves three distinct operations:

1 collecting data about the action so that it documents the clearest possible
  description of what has happened;
2 interpreting the data you have collected so that you can develop a tentative
  explanation of what has happened;
3 evaluating what you have done so that you can re-plan for further action.
  Monitoring the action means generating data to use as a basis to reflect on and
  evaluate what has happened, and to plan further action. This constitutes the
  action-reflection cycle (see page 58).

How may you generate data?

Some of the action will be your own personal action, and some will be other people’s. Generating data therefore involves:

• monitoring your own action;
• monitoring other people’s action;
• possibly monitoring critical

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