TUGASAN 2-JURNAL

TITLE

JURNAL 1:The effect of pictures and prompts on the writing of students in primary grades: Action research by graduate students at California States University.

JURNAL 2: Action research in distributed problem based learning professional education

JURNAL 3: Qualitative assessment across language barriers: An action research study


SAMPLE

JURNAL 1:165 students and 9 teacher -researcher
JURNAL 2:community of learners in Med in E -learning at University of Sheffield consist of

• Professional trainer and developer, self employed or in public and private sector

teacher and lecturer in further and open education

• Adult continuing educator

• People working in libraries and resources centre

• Open and distance learning educators and developers
• 
  

JURNAL 3:twelve students of the Sudan University of Science and Technology (SUST), Khartoum.


SETTING

JURNAL 1:Classrooms
JURNAL 2:E-learning environment ( Web CT, chat room, Intranet. com site)
JURNAL 3:Sudan University of Science and Technology, Khartoum

PROCEDURE
JURNAL 1:

• Teacher-researchers discussed and decided what types of pictures should use in the research. Types of paper to use and how to asses the end product.

• There are two phase involved in this study.

• Two different pictures were used in this study ( apple and strawberry)

• The order in which the pictures would be presented would be switched. It means two groups will get different pictures. One group will have strawberry picture and the other groups will get apple pictures. If in the phase one group A get the pictures and prompt, then they will get the prompt only in phase two. Same goes to group 2

• Half the teacher-researchers and their students would be in Group A and the other half ofthe teacher-researchers and their students would be in Group B.

• The study was done in 20 minutes for each phase.

JURNAL2:

• Observation, ethnography, textual analysis and in depth interview were the methodologies used in this study.

• Main question of the study: How does a group of distributed learners negotiate its way through the problem that it is working on? How does it come to define its problem, produce a method for investigating it, and produce end product. What happens to members of the group as they participate in this group?

• This research only involves one cycle and was done in 13 weeks. The participants were community of E- learning.

• They participated in 15 chat room sessions of discussion and each session took 1 hour.

• The participants were given a task. They have to find an issue related to their course. For example Computer Mediated Communications in Learning. The end product was the proposal of the issue.

• The progress o of the groups was observed by researcher.

• The data of this study were analyzed by researcher.

JURNAL 3:

• This research took two years to be completed.

• The main question of this research were how could to assess fairly a group of students with whom did not share a common first language, or a common culture?” and how did the instructors and students create common understanding across language and cultural barriers

• Before this research was done he participants were asked to attend English and technology class for 6 months.

• The students were given a task related to development of technology where they have to construct a digital portfolio containing all work produced during the course.
• Student were assessed using differences approaches.
  

• The digital portfolio done by the participants were assessed using three approaches.

COLLECTING AND ANALYZED DATA

JOURNAL 1

• Data were analyzed by counting words and letter and the quality of writing.

• Data were presented in histogram.

JOURNAL 2

• Data were analyzed using qualitative method.

• Two sets of data are used in this research: The first set consists of transcripts of the communications and work of the dPBL group, easily available from the Web-CT learning environment. The second set consists of data from face-to-face in-depth interviews between the course participants and me. Both sets of data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach(Glaser & Strauss, 1968; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).\

JOURNAL 3

• Data were analyzed using qualitative methods.

• The product of the task (essay and video presentation) done by participants were evaluated.

• The researcher used rubric, checklist form and porfolio to collect the data.

• The researcher used narrative style to present his finding.

ANALYSING

I found that all journals are individual are action research. For the procedure, journal 1,2,3 involved 1 cycle .For analyzing data in journal 1 the researcher use content analysis method because it is the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Qualitative is when the researcher used semiotic types of qualitative analysis( study of word) and quantitative when reseaarcher used pie chart to present his finding. (Action research in teaching and learning; Lin S. Norton).For second journal the researcher also used qualitative method which is thematic analysis because the researcher describe the grounded theory used in his research and also describe about the step in carrying thematic analysis ( immersion, generating categories,deleting categories etc....). For journal number 3, the researcher also used qualitative method. He used checklist form, rubric and the product of students task to collect the data and present his data in narrative style.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion , all the research done by the researchers were an action research study as its fulfill the characteristic of action research.( Refer the characteristic of action research in Action research in teaching and learning;Lin S. Norton).But i would choose the second journal entitled Action research and distributed problem based learning in continuing professional education as the best action research as it describe all the steps in action research in detail.

SYNTHESIZING


There are three approaches of action research which are positivist , interpretivist and enhancement approach.Positivist approach means to test particular intervention. The example of this action research is by looking at journal 1.For interpretivist approach, the aim is to to enable practioners to interprete their practice. For example journal 2.
The fundamental of action research is we as practitioner can investigate our practices systematically so that we can improve our practices and at the same time build new theory that can benefit to many parties.

Refer to journal 1, the researcher found that not all the pictures can give positive effect in students writing, and he suggest what teacher should do in order to improve students writing.Thus, this finding prove the importance of action research in examine and reflect on their classroom practices( Mcniff, 2002).

Refer journal 2
Besides, the purpose of action research is a method of continuing professional development for academic university( Kember and Gow , 1992). As mention before, the purpose of this research is to investigate problem based learning in new context with a novel approach. From the finding, the researcher know how participants works and sustaining themselves as learning communities. The knowledge of this study help practitioners to understand how problem based learning works and give new insight of this method.

Refer journal 3
The researcher try to share his experience during assessing students assignment. ( in this case language is the barrier because the researcher and students come from different country with different culture and language)The researcher used 3 approach in assessing students and at the end he found the best approach.Thus. action research is an aid to reflective thinking which result in action. ( Ponte, 2002).

All action research must consist all the steps plan, act, observe and reflect and this cycle must be repeated so that the practioners may get the best methods in their practices.

The data can be analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. For qualitative, basically two methods were used; thematic and content analysis.For quantitative desciptive and inferial could be used. But, i found that the researchers in these journal prefer to used qualitatitive data. analysis
(The purposes of action research were mentioned in Action Research in Teaching and learning books written by Lin S Norton)