STLHE 2016 SAPES

Action research became institutionalized in K-12 teacher education in the late 1960s as a method to evolve pedagogical practices. Today action research is being used to empower individual teachers and transform school systems. Action research is not routinely used in higher education to develop faculty and this research paper describes how it can be used to empower faculty and their students to co-create evidence-based teaching and learning practices.


This research presentation will recount a case in which an educator, a clinician and a student co-developed a protocol using community-based action research that challenged a clinical training tradition in ultrasound. This tradition extended patient examination times for student training which limited clinical placements and impacted enrolment numbers. The training protocol was developed using action research (Stringer, 2014) and tested for transferability using mixed methods (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). During the action research phase of the project, the student performed a greater number of total examinations than the rest of her cohort and a statistically significant number of independent exams (H=36.297, p < 0.01). The mixed methods results found the protocol group (n=5) and the control group (n=9) performing equally.


This project illustrates how evidence-based research can successfully challenge a long-standing training issue. Not only did it facilitate the inclusion of the student perspective, it also resulted in the unintentional professional development of the non-student researchers. This research presentation will also describe how the action research methodology facilitates epiphanic and existential events that can lead to professional identity development and increased professional capacity (Feldman, 1999, 2007; Stringer, 2014).