Getting Students Involved in Action Research

Getting your students involved in your action research can be vitally important. Don’t be afraid to tell them what you are doing and why you are doing it and try to encourage them to be honest in the feedback they give you.

It will help if you try to focus the students on helping you to evaluate your methodology, materials and activities rather than asking them to judge you as a teacher. By taking the focus off of yourself and depersonalising it, you will allow them to be more open and honest about the feedback they give you.

You can collect feedback from your students in many ways, but there are some important factors to take into account. These are the degree to which you share the results of this feedback with them and the degree of anonymity you allow them in giving you the feedback.

There are 4 different combinations of these factors and each will have a different effect.

Anonymous Open

You allow your students to remain anonymous, but you share their feedback openly with the whole class.

Anonymous – Closed

You can allow your students to be anonymous and keep the results of the information you gather to yourself.

Named – Closed

You can identify the feedback to a particular student and keep the results of the information you gather to yourself.

Named – Open

You can identify the feedback to a particular student and share it openly with the class.

Most activities can be used in any of these four ways

Example: You want to find out how difficult a listening activity was, so you give each student a pies of paper and ask them to grade the activity from one to ten. One being very easy and ten being very difficult. Once they have done this you collect in the pieces of paper.

Now if you tabulate the results and tell the students the results, then this is anonymous- open feedback.

If you tabulate the results and them keep them to yourself, then this is anonymous – closed feedback.

If you ask the students to write their names on the piece of paper when they hand them in to you, and you keep the results to yourself, then this is named – closed feedback.

If in stead of using a piece of paper you ask students to hold up a card with a score on for the rest of the class to see, then this is named - open feedback.

Your choice of these four combinations will effect the degree of honesty you get from your students, the degree to which you expose yourself to criticism, the degree to which you are able to share your rational and the effects that peer pressure will have upon your results, so you need to choose wisely.

Anonymity vs Named

Anonymity gives your students the opportunity to be honest with you. If your students don’t like something you are doing they are much more likely to tell you about it, if they can do so anonymously. This way they don’t risk any retaliation or bad felling from you. Remember that as the teacher you have a lot of power over your students and for them to tell you that they don’t like or agree with something you are doing takes a lot of courage. Being able to identify feedback to a particular student can, however, be very helpful. Your knowledge of that particular student and the problems, strengths or weakness they have may help you to better understand their response. You may have just one student in your class who is having a problem and knowing which one it is can enable you to give them the help and support they need.

Openness vs Closed

By being open and sharing the results of your feedback or research with the class, you are openly exposing yourself to their criticism and for many teachers and students this takes a lot of courage. This openness can be useful though in that it gives you the chance to address any criticisms and possible misconceptions that your class may have about your methods. You can share your rationale with your students and help them to understand that there may be things that you ask them to do that they don’t like, but these things can be very beneficial for them. Some students may however prefer their feedback to you to be private. They may not wish for other students within the class to know what they think or they may not wish to be seen to be either critical or supportive of your methods. By having closed feedback you can remove some elements of the influence of peer pressure from your research and this could well help you to get a more accurate and honest result.

Your choice will be effected to a large degree by the nature of the research that you want to do and your relationship with the class.

Analysing and reflecting on student feedback

In many cases you might find it beneficial to vary your methods and compare the kinds of results and feedback you are getting from the students.

Getting feedback from your students can be enormously beneficial and informative, but the degree to which this data is useful will always depend on your ability to be objective about it and your ability to analyse the response you get and draw useful conclusions from the responses.

Remember that you are a trained teacher with an understanding of the pedagogical processes involved in learning. Use that understanding to interpret the results of your feedback.

Example: You try new listening activity; you collect feedback from your students and discover that they all hated doing the activity. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad activity. It may mean that you need to try the activity another way or that your students didn’t understand the activity and that you need to explain and share you rationale for doing it with them. It could mean that they just felt uncomfortable doing something differently and they need to get used to it. It could also mean that it was a bad activity and you shouldn’t use it again.

You are the teacher and you will need to use your understanding of the classroom, your students, the pedagogy and the results of your research to make a decision.

Written by Nik Peachey  - January 2008

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