Before taking this class, I thought action research meant large scale, grant funded projects that would be overwhelming
for me and that had no practical use in my classroom. I learned that action research is actually very practical for classroom
application, and that I could conduct small, manageable projects that would impact my classroom teaching. We learned during
this class to develop a focus by identifying a problem we wanted to address. Next we reviewed applicable literature,
identified data we wanted to collect, decided how to collect the data, surveyed participants and analyzed our collected data.
I wanted to see if using timelines in my history classes would help students make connections between events and the time
periods in which the events occurred. I taught lessons using student and teacher made timelines and compared student scores
from those lessons to scores from lessons taught without timelines. Students definitely did better on tests when they used
timelines, and when I asked the students to reflect on the lessons, they overwhelmingly preferred the lessons with timelines.
After this experience, I now know I can conduct action research in my classroom, and I have several ideas about
the projects I want to develop next.
