M- for Action Research - Assignment Example

This is the same reasoning that can be applied in this case, It makes sense that data summaries can act as prompts for people to better retrieve in their minds and from the data what is valuable and useful about the data set. The text gives us a few guiding questions to be able to perform this exercise of data summaries creation properly, and to good and useful effect. One set of questions has to do with the context of the data collection. What is the reason and context for collecting the data?

What is the rationale for the place and for the method of collecting data? Another set of questions relate to the data's importance. Why is the data important and what are the surprising aspects of the data? The third question set relates to the issues that the data impacts most. What new viewpoints, ideas and questions does the data spawn? What does the data say or not say about future courses of action, next steps, and future analyses to be made regarding the data? The idea is that in answering these questions, a person or group accessing the data in the future will be able to make sense of the data, which would not otherwise be possible if the data is just left hanging without these qualifying summaries.

The summaries are useful in the current sense too, for me and my data collection exercise (Data Analysis, n.d., p. 168). II. Why I Chose M32 I chose this technique precisely for the way the summaries provide me with the context for my data collection, especially when I have to retrieve the data at some future time. It is human nature to forget sometimes the context and the reasons for collecting things in everyday life and even in the academic life. The artifacts of my teaching, for instance, can readily be buried by my daily cares, and just by the sheer volume of new inputs that I have to attend to in my daily life and in my daily experiences as a teacher.

The summaries are a way for me to very easily catalog and to make sense of the data that I collect. This is similar to creating folders and folder labels for things like pictures, before they are stowed away in the filing cabinets, or in the picture galleries on Facebook for instance. The summaries provide me with likewise my understanding of the data in some way, and by creating the summaries just after I am able to finish the data collection, I am able to offer my fresh take and a fresh snapshot of the understanding of the data, the reason for the data collection exercise, the outstanding and surprising data points and analyses, and any other special circumstances that can guide me when recollecting about the process and the nature of the data later on.

Hopefully, when the summaries are done right, with care to answer all of the guide questions that have been discussed in the text, the future analyses and uses of the data will likewise be done very well, lending themselves to distilling new insights, and lending themselves and the data to be used in the proper way. The context of the data collection, for instance, can inform future analyses and research about the right way to analyze and to make use of the data, and the limitations of the data collected by way of the limits of the data's applicability and the limits of the analyses that can be undertaken with the data as well (Data Analysis, n.d.. p. 168). III. How I Used M32 My primary mode of data collection is my daily interactions with my class