You Can Conduct Action Research in Your Classroom!

When you try something new in the classroom, you are engaging in an informal version of action research.

Action research can lead to concrete gains in student performance. Unfortunately, there are very few opportunities to share with others - outside the classroom, and especially beyond the school or district - insights and knowledge gained through action and experience. All educators and researchers ultimately suffer the consequences of this isolation.

Fortunately, Altec at the University of Kansas has stepped in and is attempting to fill the need for better sharing of information. Altec has created the Action Research Network, which provides a free database of action research reports filed by teachers. The Network also provides teachers with a user-friendly framework for creating new action research projects and filing reports so that valuable insights and knowledge may be shared through the Network.

Academic researchers commonly look to the classroom to identify new topics for research. By reporting on classroom-based action research, teachers can help inform and drive new research. Research is important; more research is needed. And you can play a critical role in the process: As the Action Research Network database grows, teachers and researchers will benefit from an accumulation of insights and knowledge.

So, we hope you will support the Action Research Network: Use it as a resource. Share your own action research through it. And tell your colleagues about it. As far as we can tell, no one else is doing this. More to the point, it doesn't appear as if anyone else out there is going to pick up the ball if these folks don't succeed. They deserve our support - and it is in our interest to support them.

We also encourage you to become involved in other professional networking [http://www.textmapping.org/network.html] activities, including discussions [http://www.textmapping.org/discussions.html], listservs [http://www.textmapping.org/listserv.html], sigs [http://www.textmapping.org/sigs.html], and other such opportunities to collaborate [http://www.textmapping.org/collaborate.html].