action research report writing

Linking Research to Action: A Simple Guide to Writing an Action Research Report

What Is Action Research, and Why Do We Do It?

Action research is any research into practice undertaken by those involved in that practice, with the primary goal of encouraging continued reflection and making improvement. It can be done in any professional field, including medicine, nursing, social work, psychology, and education. Action research is particularly popular in the field of education. When it comes to teaching, practitioners may be interested in trying out different teaching methods in the classroom, but are unsure of their effectiveness. Action research provides an opportunity to explore the effectiveness of a particular teaching practice, the development of a curriculum, or your students’ learning, hence making continual improvement possible. In other words, the use of an interactive action-and-research process enables practitioners to get an idea of what they and their learners really do inside of the classroom, not merely what they think they can do. By doing this, it is hoped that both the teaching and the learning occurring in the classroom can be better tailored to fit the learners’ needs.

You may be wondering how action research differs from traditional research. The term itself already suggests that it is concerned with both “action” and “research,” as well as the association between the two. Kurt Lewin (1890-1947), a famous psychologist who coined this term, believed that there was “no action without research; no research without action” (Marrow, 1969, p.163). It is certainly possible, and perhaps commonplace, for people to try to have one without the other, but the unique combination of the two is what distinguishes action research from most other forms of enquiry. Traditional research emphasizes the review of prior research, rigorous control of the research design, and generalizable and preferably statistically significant results, all of which help examine the theoretical significance of the issue. Action research, with its emphasis on the insider’s perspective and the practical significance of a current issue, may instead allow less representative sampling, looser procedures, and the presentation of raw data and statistically insignificant results.

What Should We Include in an Action Research Report?

The components put into an action research report largely coincide with the steps used in the action research process. This process usually starts with a question or an observation about a current problem. After identifying the problem area and narrowing it down to make it more manageable for research, the development process continues as you devise an action plan to investigate your question. This will involve gathering data and evidence to support your solution. Common data collection methods include observation of individual or group behavior, taking audio or video recordings, distributing questionnaires or surveys, conducting interviews, asking for peer observations and comments, taking field notes, writing journals, and studying the work samples of your own and your target participants. You may choose to use more than one of these data collection methods. After you have selected your method and are analyzing the data you have collected, you will also reflect upon your entire process of action research. You may have a better solution to your question now, due to the increase of your available evidence. You may also think about the steps you will try next, or decide that the practice needs to be observed again with modifications. If so, the whole action research process starts all over again.

In brief, action research is more like a cyclical process, with the reflection upon your action and research findings affecting changes in your practice, which may lead to extended questions and further action. This brings us back to the essential steps of action research: identifying the problem, devising an action plan, implementing the plan, and finally, observing and reflecting upon the process. Your action research report should comprise all of these essential steps. Feldman and Weiss (n.d.) summarized them as five structural elements, which do not have to be written in a particular order. Your report should:

• Describe the context where the action research takes place. This could be, for example, the school in which you teach. Both features of the school and the population associated with it (e.g., students and parents) would be illustrated as well.
• Contain a statement of your research focus. This would explain where your research questions come from, the problem you intend to investigate, and the goals you want to achieve. You may also mention prior research studies you have read that are related to your action research study.
• Detail the method(s) used. This part includes the procedures you used to collect data, types of data in your report, and justification of your used strategies.
• Highlight the research findings. This is the part in which you observe and reflect upon your practice. By analyzing the evidence you have gathered, you will come to understand whether the initial problem has been solved or not, and what research you have yet to accomplish.
• Suggest implications. You may discuss how the findings of your research will affect your future practice, or explain any new research plans you have that have been inspired by this report’s action research.

The overall structure of your paper will actually look more or less the same as what we commonly see in traditional research papers.

What Else Do We Need to Pay Attention to?

We discussed the major differences between action research and traditional research in the beginning of this article. Due to the difference in the focus of an action research report, the language style used may not be the same as what we normally see or use in a standard research report. Although both kinds of research, both action and traditional, can be published in academic journals, action research may also be published and delivered in brief reports or on websites for a broader, non-academic audience. Instead of using the formal style of scientific research, you may find it more suitable to write in the first person and use a narrative style while documenting your details of the research process.

However, this does not forbid using an academic writing style, which undeniably enhances the credibility of a report. According to Johnson (2002), even though personal thoughts and observations are valued and recorded along the way, an action research report should not be written in a highly subjective manner. A personal, reflective writing style does not necessarily mean that descriptions are unfair or dishonest, but statements with value judgments, highly charged language, and emotional buzzwords are best avoided.

Furthermore, documenting every detail used in the process of research does not necessitate writing a lengthy report. The purpose of giving sufficient details is to let other practitioners trace your train of thought, learn from your examples, and possibly be able to duplicate your steps of research. This is why writing a clear report that does not bore or confuse your readers is essential.

Lastly, You May Ask, Why Do We Bother to Even Write an Action Research Report?

It sounds paradoxical that while practitioners tend to have a great deal of knowledge at their disposal, often they do not communicate their insights to others. Take education as an example: It is both regrettable and regressive if every teacher, no matter how professional he or she might be, only teaches in the way they were taught and fails to understand what their peer teachers know about their practice. Writing an action research report provides you with the chance to reflect upon your own practice, make substantiated claims linking research to action, and document action and ideas as they take place. The results can then be kept, both for the sake of your own future reference, and to also make the most of your insights through the act of sharing with your professional peers.

Feldman, A., & Weiss, T. (n.d.). Suggestions for writing the action research report . Retrieved from http://people.umass.edu/~afeldman/ARreadingmaterials/WritingARReport.html

Johnson, A. P. (2002). A short guide to action research . Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Marrow, A. J. (1969). The practical theorist: The life and work of Kurt Lewin . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Tiffany Ip is a lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University. She gained a PhD in neurolinguistics after completing her Bachelor’s degree in psychology and linguistics. She strives to utilize her knowledge to translate brain research findings into practical classroom instruction.

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• What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples

What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples

Published on January 27, 2023 by Tegan George . Revised on January 12, 2024.

Table of contents

Types of action research, action research models, examples of action research, action research vs. traditional research, advantages and disadvantages of action research, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about action research.

There are 2 common types of action research: participatory action research and practical action research.

• Participatory action research emphasizes that participants should be members of the community being studied, empowering those directly affected by outcomes of said research. In this method, participants are effectively co-researchers, with their lived experiences considered formative to the research process.
• Practical action research focuses more on how research is conducted and is designed to address and solve specific issues.

Both types of action research are more focused on increasing the capacity and ability of future practitioners than contributing to a theoretical body of knowledge.

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Action research is often reflected in 3 action research models: operational (sometimes called technical), collaboration, and critical reflection.

• Operational (or technical) action research is usually visualized like a spiral following a series of steps, such as “planning → acting → observing → reflecting.”
• Collaboration action research is more community-based, focused on building a network of similar individuals (e.g., college professors in a given geographic area) and compiling learnings from iterated feedback cycles.
• Critical reflection action research serves to contextualize systemic processes that are already ongoing (e.g., working retroactively to analyze existing school systems by questioning why certain practices were put into place and developed the way they did).

Action research is often used in fields like education because of its iterative and flexible style.

After the information was collected, the students were asked where they thought ramps or other accessibility measures would be best utilized, and the suggestions were sent to school administrators. Example: Practical action research Science teachers at your city’s high school have been witnessing a year-over-year decline in standardized test scores in chemistry. In seeking the source of this issue, they studied how concepts are taught in depth, focusing on the methods, tools, and approaches used by each teacher.

Action research differs sharply from other types of research in that it seeks to produce actionable processes over the course of the research rather than contributing to existing knowledge or drawing conclusions from datasets. In this way, action research is formative , not summative , and is conducted in an ongoing, iterative way.

As such, action research is different in purpose, context, and significance and is a good fit for those seeking to implement systemic change.

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Action research comes with advantages and disadvantages.

• Action research is highly adaptable , allowing researchers to mold their analysis to their individual needs and implement practical individual-level changes.
• Action research provides an immediate and actionable path forward for solving entrenched issues, rather than suggesting complicated, longer-term solutions rooted in complex data.
• Done correctly, action research can be very empowering , informing social change and allowing participants to effect that change in ways meaningful to their communities.

Disadvantages

• Due to their flexibility, action research studies are plagued by very limited generalizability  and are very difficult to replicate . They are often not considered theoretically rigorous due to the power the researcher holds in drawing conclusions.
• Action research can be complicated to structure in an ethical manner . Participants may feel pressured to participate or to participate in a certain way.
• Action research is at high risk for research biases such as selection bias , social desirability bias , or other types of cognitive biases .

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

Action research is conducted in order to solve a particular issue immediately, while case studies are often conducted over a longer period of time and focus more on observing and analyzing a particular ongoing phenomenon.

Action research is focused on solving a problem or informing individual and community-based knowledge in a way that impacts teaching, learning, and other related processes. It is less focused on contributing theoretical input, instead producing actionable input.

Action research is particularly popular with educators as a form of systematic inquiry because it prioritizes reflection and bridges the gap between theory and practice. Educators are able to simultaneously investigate an issue as they solve it, and the method is very iterative and flexible.

A cycle of inquiry is another name for action research . It is usually visualized in a spiral shape following a series of steps, such as “planning → acting → observing → reflecting.”

Sources in this article

We strongly encourage students to use sources in their work. You can cite our article (APA Style) or take a deep dive into the articles below.

George, T. (2024, January 12). What Is Action Research? | Definition & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved June 27, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/action-research/

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2017). Research methods in education (8th edition). Routledge.

Naughton, G. M. (2001).  Action research (1st edition). Routledge.

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Action Research: What it is, Stages & Examples

The best way to get things accomplished is to do it yourself. This statement is utilized in corporations, community projects, and national governments. These organizations are relying on action research to cope with their continuously changing and unstable environments as they function in a more interdependent world.

In practical educational contexts, this involves using systematic inquiry and reflective practice to address real-world challenges, improve teaching and learning, enhance student engagement, and drive positive changes within the educational system.

This post outlines the definition of action research, its stages, and some examples.

Content Index

What is action research?

Stages of action research, the steps to conducting action research, examples of action research, advantages and disadvantages of action research.

Action research is a strategy that tries to find realistic solutions to organizations’ difficulties and issues. It is similar to applied research.

Action research refers basically learning by doing. First, a problem is identified, then some actions are taken to address it, then how well the efforts worked are measured, and if the results are not satisfactory, the steps are applied again.

It can be put into three different groups:

• Positivist: This type of research is also called “classical action research.” It considers research a social experiment. This research is used to test theories in the actual world.
• Interpretive: This kind of research is called “contemporary action research.” It thinks that business reality is socially made, and when doing this research, it focuses on the details of local and organizational factors.
• Critical: This action research cycle takes a critical reflection approach to corporate systems and tries to enhance them.

All research is about learning new things. Collaborative action research contributes knowledge based on investigations in particular and frequently useful circumstances. It starts with identifying a problem. After that, the research process is followed by the below stages:

Stage 1: Plan

For an action research project to go well, the researcher needs to plan it well. After coming up with an educational research topic or question after a research study, the first step is to develop an action plan to guide the research process. The research design aims to address the study’s question. The research strategy outlines what to undertake, when, and how.

Stage 2: Act

The next step is implementing the plan and gathering data. At this point, the researcher must select how to collect and organize research data . The researcher also needs to examine all tools and equipment before collecting data to ensure they are relevant, valid, and comprehensive.

Stage 3: Observe

Data observation is vital to any investigation. The action researcher needs to review the project’s goals and expectations before data observation. This is the final step before drawing conclusions and taking action.

Different kinds of graphs, charts, and networks can be used to represent the data. It assists in making judgments or progressing to the next stage of observing.

Stage 4: Reflect

This step involves applying a prospective solution and observing the results. It’s essential to see if the possible solution found through research can really solve the problem being studied.

The researcher must explore alternative ideas when the action research project’s solutions fail to solve the problem.

Action research is a systematic approach researchers, educators, and practitioners use to identify and address problems or challenges within a specific context. It involves a cyclical process of planning, implementing, reflecting, and adjusting actions based on the data collected. Here are the general steps involved in conducting an action research process:

Identify the action research question or problem

Clearly define the issue or problem you want to address through your research. It should be specific, actionable, and relevant to your working context.

Review existing knowledge

Conduct a literature review to understand what research has already been done on the topic. This will help you gain insights, identify gaps, and inform your research design.

Plan the research

Develop a research plan outlining your study’s objectives, methods, data collection tools, and timeline. Determine the scope of your research and the participants or stakeholders involved.

Collect data

Implement your research plan by collecting relevant data. This can involve various methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, document analysis, or focus groups. Ensure that your data collection methods align with your research objectives and allow you to gather the necessary information.

Analyze the data

Once you have collected the data, analyze it using appropriate qualitative or quantitative techniques. Look for patterns, themes, or trends in the data that can help you understand the problem better.

Reflect on the findings

Reflect on the analyzed data and interpret the results in the context of your research question. Consider the implications and possible solutions that emerge from the data analysis. This reflection phase is crucial for generating insights and understanding the underlying factors contributing to the problem.

Develop an action plan

Based on your analysis and reflection, develop an action plan that outlines the steps you will take to address the identified problem. The plan should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART goals). Consider involving relevant stakeholders in planning to ensure their buy-in and support.

Implement the action plan

Put your action plan into practice by implementing the identified strategies or interventions. This may involve making changes to existing practices, introducing new approaches, or testing alternative solutions. Document the implementation process and any modifications made along the way.

Evaluate and monitor progress

Continuously monitor and evaluate the impact of your actions. Collect additional data, assess the effectiveness of the interventions, and measure progress towards your goals. This evaluation will help you determine if your actions have the desired effects and inform any necessary adjustments.

Reflect and iterate

Reflect on the outcomes of your actions and the evaluation results. Consider what worked well, what did not, and why. Use this information to refine your approach, make necessary adjustments, and plan for the next cycle of action research if needed.

Remember that participatory action research is an iterative process, and multiple cycles may be required to achieve significant improvements or solutions to the identified problem. Each cycle builds on the insights gained from the previous one, fostering continuous learning and improvement.

Explore Insightfully Contextual Inquiry in Qualitative Research

Here are two real-life examples of action research.

Action research initiatives are frequently situation-specific. Still, other researchers can adapt the techniques. The example is from a researcher’s (Franklin, 1994) report about a project encouraging nature tourism in the Caribbean.

In 1991, this was launched to study how nature tourism may be implemented on the four Windward Islands in the Caribbean: St. Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, and St. Vincent.

For environmental protection, a government-led action study determined that the consultation process needs to involve numerous stakeholders, including commercial enterprises.

First, two researchers undertook the study and held search conferences on each island. The search conferences resulted in suggestions and action plans for local community nature tourism sub-projects.

Several islands formed advisory groups and launched national awareness and community projects. Regional project meetings were held to discuss experiences, self-evaluations, and strategies. Creating a documentary about a local initiative helped build community. And the study was a success, leading to a number of changes in the area.

Lau and Hayward (1997) employed action research to analyze Internet-based collaborative work groups.

Over two years, the researchers facilitated three action research problem -solving cycles with 15 teachers, project personnel, and 25 health practitioners from diverse areas. The goal was to see how Internet-based communications might affect their virtual workgroup.

First, expectations were defined, technology was provided, and a bespoke workgroup system was developed. Participants suggested shorter, more dispersed training sessions with project-specific instructions.

The second phase saw the system’s complete deployment. The final cycle witnessed system stability and virtual group formation. The key lesson was that the learning curve was poorly misjudged, with frustrations only marginally met by phone-based technical help. According to the researchers, the absence of high-quality online material about community healthcare was harmful.

Role clarity, connection building, knowledge sharing, resource assistance, and experiential learning are vital for virtual group growth. More study is required on how group support systems might assist groups in engaging with their external environment and boost group members’ learning. 

Action research has both good and bad points.

• It is very flexible, so researchers can change their analyses to fit their needs and make individual changes.
• It offers a quick and easy way to solve problems that have been going on for a long time instead of complicated, long-term solutions based on complex facts.
• If It is done right, it can be very powerful because it can lead to social change and give people the tools to make that change in ways that are important to their communities.

Disadvantages

• These studies have a hard time being generalized and are hard to repeat because they are so flexible. Because the researcher has the power to draw conclusions, they are often not thought to be theoretically sound.
• Setting up an action study in an ethical way can be hard. People may feel like they have to take part or take part in a certain way.
• It is prone to research errors like selection bias , social desirability bias, and other cognitive biases.

LEARN ABOUT: Self-Selection Bias

This post discusses how action research generates knowledge, its steps, and real-life examples. It is very applicable to the field of research and has a high level of relevance. We can only state that the purpose of this research is to comprehend an issue and find a solution to it.

At QuestionPro, we give researchers tools for collecting data, like our survey software, and a library of insights for any long-term study. Go to the Insight Hub if you want to see a demo or learn more about it.

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Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ’s)

Action research is a systematic approach to inquiry that involves identifying a problem or challenge in a practical context, implementing interventions or changes, collecting and analyzing data, and using the findings to inform decision-making and drive positive change.

Action research can be conducted by various individuals or groups, including teachers, administrators, researchers, and educational practitioners. It is often carried out by those directly involved in the educational setting where the research takes place.

The steps of action research typically include identifying a problem, reviewing relevant literature, designing interventions or changes, collecting and analyzing data, reflecting on findings, and implementing improvements based on the results.

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Action Research: Improving Schools and Empowering Educators

Student resources, sample action research reports.

• Sample Action Research Report 1  
• Sample Action Research Report 2

Suggestions for Writing the Action Research Report *

Allan Feldman and Tarin Weiss

University of Massachusetts Amherst

There are five structural elements for an action research report. Although these elements will be described in a particular order, they need not be that way in your report. In fact, they do not even need to be separated from one another.

The context  

The first element of the action research report is a description of the context within which the action research took place. Depending on the project that you do, the locus of the context can be your classroom, your school, or your school district. It is possible that the context of the project includes aspects of more than one of these. It is important to remember that the physical description of the setting is important, but that there are other aspects that are important depending on the project. For example, if your project focuses on working with parents or students, a description of these populations should be included. If the project relates to an entire district, salient features of the geographical and political area, as well as important features of the schools are part of the relevant context.

Statement and Origin of your Research Focus

The statement of your research focus should answer one or more of the following questions:

Ä What did you investigate?

Ä What have you accomplished or attempted to accomplish in this study?

Ä What have been your goals?

This element of the report should also address the way in which your starting point developed. That is

How did the idea originate?

How and why did it change through the year?

What impact did your research notebook group have on the development of your starting point?

In addition, this section should include what you learned from reading the research literature that informed your study.

Methods This element of the report focuses on the way in which you investigated your practice situation.

Ä Describe what you did and why.

Ä What sort of data did you collect?

Ä How did you collect the data?

Ä What successes or difficulties did you have in carrying out this action research?

The Findings The fourth element of the report states what it was that you accomplished and/or found out. Remember that all action research projects involve actions so therefore there are effects of those actions. And, every action research project results in the teacher coming to a new understanding of his or her own educational situation. Therefore each report should contain some description of what it was that you learned. Make sure to include any events, circumstances or data that contradict what you had hoped to do or find out.

Implications Although this element is labeled implications , it is not necessary that each project have far reaching effects. These implications could be a statement of how participation in this research has affected the ways in which you look at your teaching, your students, or your school. In other words, do you see the educational world differently now, and how will that affect what it is that you will do next?

Finally, include a paragraph describing the next step of this research.   Is it complete?   Is there another scenario you wish to research?   Explain how you would continue action research following up on this study or developing a new idea.   Consider possible supports (without an action research course) and impediments to your efforts.

Overall, this structure is not dissimilar to what you may be familiar with -- the standard research report. There is a general introduction that places the research within the field, a statement of the problem or hypothesis, the method used, findings of the research, and finally, implications. But it can be significantly different because you may feel free to write in the first person and to use a narrative style -- to tell a validated story. You may also feel free to write in the formal style of scientific research. The choice is yours.

* Based on suggestions made by Peter Posch.

Action Research Tutorials-CCAR

Action research tutorials, tutorial 11:  writing your report, tutorial 11: resources for writing, your action research report.

A. Learning From Others

Reading Examples of Action Research Reports from university programs will help you think about the many ways in which people have organized their writing about their action research. It is an effective way to get past writer's block. You have done the work; now you need to share your story in the most compelling way you can. Read a few examples from different universities and see what style seems right for your audience.   

Center for Collaborative Action Research The Center has collected Action Research Portfolios that serve as useful models. The model portfolios are categorized into four groups: 

Classroom Action Research  

Youth Action Research  

Professional Development Action Research  

Community Participatory Action Research 

Organizational Action Research

Center for Practitioner Research at National Louis University Their online journal features original practitioner research studies, theoretical articles about practitioner research, descriptions of practitioner research centers, and book reviews.-  Inquiry in Education Journal

Educational Journal of Living Theories Many -  Action Research Projects  and  a range of studies published in the journal

Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA Many examples of -  Moravian Action Research Projects  some of which focus on the improvement in the arts

Social Publishers Foundation  is a non-profit organization and supports the publishing of  action research reports.

Washington State University, Vancouver Wisdom of Practice: An online journal of (freely accessed)

B. Using Templates and Rubrics to Guide the Writing

In the activities, we have provided a template to help you write your action research report. There are many other templates to help you use a particular style to write your report. Journals or magazines will also have advice as to how they want submissions to their publications to be formatted. If your school or editor suggests that you use the American Psychological Association (APA) style, you will find that  Purdue University's Online Writing Lab  (OWL) will have the best information. Here is their  template  annotated so you can understand the conventions they suggest. Reading through a writing rubric can help you think through the process of writing. Writing one as a group will help you think through the process of doing action research and can be a great exercise before you engage in writing. We include some rubrics here to provide ideas but it is best if you develop your own as a group. We have developed this  web portfolio rubric  to evaluate the action research e-portfolios and/or papers. We use a shorter scoring rubric for evaluating the e-portfolio and a presentation. You are welcome to use this to develop your own document. If you are working in a group, it is great to have each of you use the scoring sheet to give feedback to your peers on their e-portfolios and their practice presentations.  

C. Developing an Online Portfolio of Action Research

Some of you will choose to share your ideas and work over the internet in e-portfolios. Your work might be linked to the university, school, district, state, or global networks. To publish your work in this way you will need to make use of color, design, and multimedia material. There are many online journals for publishing action research. You might want to consider publishing your work on the  Social Publishing Foundation .

For developing your website, here are some considerations:

1) Opening "splash" or home page: This page should present the major topic or problem of your action research and yourself as the action researcher. "My Action Research Project" is not a very descriptive title and something like "Seeing Below the Surface: Using video and peer feedback to improve coaching" is more informative. Your name and links to more information about you are important to include on the page. The page should be graphically clear with images that clearly communicate the nature of the problem you are exploring. The use of an appropriate metaphor (pieces of a puzzle, seasonal changes, transportation, lenses, magnification) can often help communicate your ideas in an engaging way. A video of you giving a short overview of your project (the elevator pitch) might invite your readers to continue exploring.  2) The site should have a very clear navigation bar that helps the reader find the different parts of your work. These should be clear on every page so that the reader does not get lost in exploring your work. Suggested tabs and pull-down menus might look like this:

3) Pay attention to color and design. You don't want to use so many vibrant colors and images that you lose the sense of your work. On the other hand, you do not want to waste the potential of the web by only posting text.

Technology application: web journals (blogs) and project portfolios and wikis (quick websites).

This website was created using the   Wix editor

Blogs (  Blogger.com ,  Typepad , LiveJournal , http://wordpress.com ), phone blogs (moblogs at blogger)

b2evolution  http://www.b2evolution.net/

wiki.com  (not a blogging platform but good for web creation for e-portfolios with feedback)

Good sites for website creation and blogging   weebly.com  -

Google Sites for wiki-web sites that can integrate all of the many google suites of applications 

Site builder is another website editor that many find useful.

Choosing a color scheme

http://kuler.adobe.com  (quick access to popular color schemes based on topics)

http://colorschemedesigner.com/  (create a color scheme and see it in action)

http://www.pictaculous.com/  (use your logo to get the right color scheme)

When you finish your website, please consider submitting it to the Center for Collaborative Action Research -- we will review it and give you feedback which hopefully leads to having your site published. 

D. Developing your Conference Presentation

Some of you might chose the conference format for sharing your action research with peers. In this format you will be given an amount of time and you will need to carefully consider what you can include in the time frame. You will want to make sure you give enough time for each part of your talk. You don't want to spend all your time telling stories about what happened and not get to your analysis of data or reflections on change. 

Here is a guide for the amount of time on each of the elements.

If you have a 10 minute talk, then 10% would be 1 minute. 

10% -  Opening-- Introducing the problem and why you care about it.

20% - Setting the Background (what you learned from reading and from what you know about the setting)

10% -  Your Action Research Approach and plan

40% - Reporting on your Iterative Process (cycles of research)

20% -  Overall Reflections on learning

You can find examples of scoring sheets for presentations in the  Google Drive  / Dropbox  template folders. Example of a short but effective presentation:

E. Publishing Articles on Action Research

If you plan to submit your writing to a journal you will need to match your work to their format. If you are writing a report to share with colleagues, you have more flexibility in the way you describe your work. We include a listing of journals that accept action research reports.

Listing of Journals for publishing accounts of Action Research  

F. Exhibitions of Teacher (and student) Learning

Watch an example of an exhibition of action research:  5th Annual Action Research with Technology Conference  which was held on June 18 & 19 2013. The session has been video streamed. You will see keynote discussions and the presentations of four learning circles.  This is posted to provide a model for organizing a university conference. 

Making Learning Visible  provides resources and tools to support learning in groups in the classroom and schools. The tools are mostly intended for teachers, professional development designers and coaches, and administrators. Almost all of the tools emphasize greater intentionality combined with careful looking and listening. The site includes five kinds of tools and resources:

Supporting Learning in Groups in the Classroom includes practical tools with suggestions for creating learning groups at the beginning of the school year, forming study groups in classrooms, and promoting a culture of dialogue. provides tools for forming adult study groups, hands-on activities for adults to explore learning groups and documentation for themselves, and conversation structures for discussing and reflecting on student learning.

Supporting Learning in Groups in the Staffroom provides tools for forming adult study groups, hands-on activities for adults to explore learning groups and documentation for themselves, and conversation structures for discussing and reflecting on student learning.

Documenting Individual and Group Learning includes resources for understanding, creating, and sharing documentation with students and colleagues. Some tools will help you think through the purpose of your documentation; others provide guidelines for gathering or sharing documentation via video, computer, photographs, or powerpoint.

Engaging Families in Supporting Student Learning offers resources to inform families about visible learning, involve families in supporting their children’s learning, and communicate with families about learning. Tools range from a refrigerator reminder to guidelines for parents interested in forming their own study group.

Making Learning Visible beyond the Classroom provides tools and templates for creating bulletin boards, documentation panels, visual essays, and school-wide exhibitions that make learning and learners visible, with examples from preschool-high school.

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Writing Up Your Action Research Project

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Many practice-based researchers have expert knowledge of doing research but often experience difficulties when writing it up and communicating the significance of what they have done. This book aims to help bridge the gap. Packed with practical advice and strong theoretical resources it takes you through the basics of designing and producing your text so that it will meet established standards and high quality assurance expectations.

Divided into 3 distinctive parts, key points include:

• understanding writing practices
• engaging with the literatures
• how to write up a project report or dissertation
• how writing is judged in terms of professional and academic writing practices
• developing ideas for further study and publication

Writing up Your Action Research Project is an essential text for practitioners on professional education and undergraduate courses across disciplines who want their writing to reflect the excellence of their research. It is the ideal companion to the author’s You and Your Action Research Project , now in its fourth edition .

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter | 10  pages, introduction, chapter | 24  pages, prologue: what do i need to know about action research why do i need to know it, part | 61  pages, designing and planning your text, chapter | 22  pages, getting ready to write: designing and planning, chapter | 17  pages, what goes into your text how do you communicate with your reader, chapter | 18  pages, developing communicative competence: writing for a reader, part | 55  pages, writing and producing a text, chapter | 15  pages, learning to be a writer: engaging with the literatures, chapter | 14  pages, learning to produce a text: the writing process, how do i write an action research report or master's dissertation, part | 37  pages, reflecting and evaluating, how is the quality of an action research text judged, the significance of your writing, chapter | 3  pages.

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4 Preparing for Action Research in the Classroom: Practical Issues

ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

• What sort of considerations are necessary to take action in your educational context?
• How do you facilitate an action plan without disrupting your teaching?
• How do you respond when the unplanned happens during data collection?

An action research project is a practical endeavor that will ultimately be shaped by your educational context and practice. Now that you have developed a literature review, you are ready to revise your initial plans and begin to plan your project. This chapter will provide some advice about your considerations when undertaking an action research project in your classroom.

Maintain Focus

Hopefully, you found a lot a research on your topic. If so, you will now have a better understanding of how it fits into your area and field of educational research. Even though the topic and area you are researching may not be small, your study itself should clearly focus on one aspect of the topic in your classroom. It is important to maintain clarity about what you are investigating because a lot will be going on simultaneously during the research process and you do not want to spend precious time on erroneous aspects that are irrelevant to your research.

Even though you may view your practice as research, and vice versa, you might want to consider your research project as a projection or megaphone for your work that will bring attention to the small decisions that make a difference in your educational context. From experience, our concern is that you will find that researching one aspect of your practice will reveal other interconnected aspects that you may find interesting, and you will disorient yourself researching in a confluence of interests, commitments, and purposes. We simply want to emphasize – don’t try to research everything at once. Stay focused on your topic, and focus on exploring it in depth, instead of its many related aspects. Once you feel you have made progress in one aspect, you can then progress to other related areas, as new research projects that continue the research cycle.

Identify a Clear Research Question

Your literature review should have exposed you to an array of research questions related to your topic. More importantly, your review should have helped identify which research questions we have addressed as a field, and which ones still need to be addressed . More than likely your research questions will resemble ones from your literature review, while also being distinguishable based upon your own educational context and the unexplored areas of research on your topic.

Regardless of how your research question took shape, it is important to be clear about what you are researching in your educational context. Action research questions typically begin in ways related to “How does … ?” or “How do I/we … ?”, for example:

Research Question Examples

• How does a semi-structured morning meeting improve my classroom community?
• How does historical fiction help students think about people’s agency in the past?
• How do I improve student punctuation use through acting out sentences?
• How do we increase student responsibility for their own learning as a team of teachers?

I particularly favor questions with I or we, because they emphasize that you, the actor and researcher, will be clearly taking action to improve your practice. While this may seem rather easy, you need to be aware of asking the right kind of question. One issue is asking a too pointed and closed question that limits the possibility for analysis. These questions tend to rely on quantitative answers, or yes/no answers. For example, “How many students got a 90% or higher on the exam, after reviewing the material three times?

Another issue is asking a question that is too broad, or that considers too many variables. For example, “How does room temperature affect students’ time-on-task?” These are obviously researchable questions, but the aim is a cause-and-effect relationship between variables that has little or no value to your daily practice.

I also want to point out that your research question will potentially change as the research develops. If you consider the question:

As you do an activity, you may find that students are more comfortable and engaged by acting sentences out in small groups, instead of the whole class. Therefore, your question may shift to:

• How do I improve student punctuation use through acting out sentences, in small groups ?

By simply engaging in the research process and asking questions, you will open your thinking to new possibilities and you will develop new understandings about yourself and the problematic aspects of your educational context.

Understand Your Capabilities and Know that Change Happens Slowly

Similar to your research question, it is important to have a clear and realistic understanding of what is possible to research in your specific educational context. For example, would you be able to address unsatisfactory structures (policies and systems) within your educational context? Probably not immediately, but over time you potentially could. It is much more feasible to think of change happening in smaller increments, from within your own classroom or context, with you as one change agent. For example, you might find it particularly problematic that your school or district places a heavy emphasis on traditional grades, believing that these grades are often not reflective of the skills students have or have not mastered. Instead of attempting to research grading practices across your school or district, your research might instead focus on determining how to provide more meaningful feedback to students and parents about progress in your course. While this project identifies and addresses a structural issue that is part of your school and district context, to keep things manageable, your research project would focus the outcomes on your classroom. The more research you do related to the structure of your educational context the more likely modifications will emerge. The more you understand these modifications in relation to the structural issues you identify within your own context, the more you can influence others by sharing your work and enabling others to understand the modification and address structural issues within their contexts. Throughout your project, you might determine that modifying your grades to be standards-based is more effective than traditional grades, and in turn, that sharing your research outcomes with colleagues at an in-service presentation prompts many to adopt a similar model in their own classrooms. It can be defeating to expect the world to change immediately, but you can provide the spark that ignites coordinated changes. In this way, action research is a powerful methodology for enacting social change. Action research enables individuals to change their own lives, while linking communities of like-minded practitioners who work towards action.

Plan Thoughtfully

Planning thoughtfully involves having a path in mind, but not necessarily having specific objectives. Due to your experience with students and your educational context, the research process will often develop in ways as you expected, but at times it may develop a little differently, which may require you to shift the research focus and change your research question. I will suggest a couple methods to help facilitate this potential shift. First, you may want to develop criteria for gauging the effectiveness of your research process. You may need to refine and modify your criteria and your thinking as you go. For example, we often ask ourselves if action research is encouraging depth of analysis beyond my typical daily pedagogical reflection. You can think about this as you are developing data collection methods and even when you are collecting data. The key distinction is whether the data you will be collecting allows for nuance among the participants or variables. This does not mean that you will have nuance, but it should allow for the possibility. Second, criteria are shaped by our values and develop into standards of judgement. If we identify criteria such as teacher empowerment, then we will use that standard to think about the action contained in our research process. Our values inform our work; therefore, our work should be judged in relation to the relevance of our values in our pedagogy and practice.

Does Your Timeline Work?

While action research is situated in the temporal span that is your life, your research project is short-term, bounded, and related to the socially mediated practices within your educational context. The timeline is important for bounding, or setting limits to your research project, while also making sure you provide the right amount of time for the data to emerge from the process.

For example, if you are thinking about examining the use of math diaries in your classroom, you probably do not want to look at a whole semester of entries because that would be a lot of data, with entries related to a wide range of topics. This would create a huge data analysis endeavor. Therefore, you may want to look at entries from one chapter or unit of study. Also, in terms of timelines, you want to make sure participants have enough time to develop the data you collect. Using the same math example, you would probably want students to have plenty of time to write in the journals, and also space out the entries over the span of the chapter or unit.

In relation to the examples, we think it is an important mind shift to not think of research timelines in terms of deadlines. It is vitally important to provide time and space for the data to emerge from the participants. Therefore, it would be potentially counterproductive to rush a 50-minute data collection into 20 minutes – like all good educators, be flexible in the research process.

Involve Others

It is important to not isolate yourself when doing research. Many educators are already isolated when it comes to practice in their classroom. The research process should be an opportunity to engage with colleagues and open up your classroom to discuss issues that are potentially impacting your entire educational context. Think about the following relationships:

Research participants

You may invite a variety of individuals in your educational context, many with whom you are in a shared situation (e.g. colleagues, administrators). These participants may be part of a collaborative study, they may simply help you develop data collection instruments or intervention items, or they may help to analyze and make sense of the data. While the primary research focus will be you and your learning, you will also appreciate how your learning is potentially influencing the quality of others’ learning.

We always tell educators to be public about your research, or anything exciting that is happening in your educational context, for that matter. In terms of research, you do not want it to seem mysterious to any stakeholder in the educational context. Invite others to visit your setting and observe your research process, and then ask for their formal feedback. Inviting others to your classroom will engage and connect you with other stakeholders, while also showing that your research was established in an ethic of respect for multiple perspectives.

Critical friends or validators

Using critical friends is one way to involve colleagues and also validate your findings and conclusions. While your positionality will shape the research process and subsequently your interpretations of the data, it is important to make sure that others see similar logic in your process and conclusions. Critical friends or validators provide some level of certification that the frameworks you use to develop your research project and make sense of your data are appropriate for your educational context. Your critical friends and validators’ suggestions will be useful if you develop a report or share your findings, but most importantly will provide you confidence moving forward.

Potential researchers

As an educational researcher, you are involved in ongoing improvement plans and district or systemic change. The flexibility of action research allows it to be used in a variety of ways, and your initial research can spark others in your context to engage in research either individually for their own purposes, or collaboratively as a grade level, team, or school. Collaborative inquiry with other educators is an emerging form of professional learning and development for schools with school improvement plans. While they call it collaborative inquiry, these schools are often using an action research model. It is good to think of all of your colleagues as potential research collaborators in the future.

Prioritize Ethical Practice

Try to always be cognizant of your own positionality during the action research process, its relation to your educational context, and any associated power relation to your positionality. Furthermore, you want to make sure that you are not coercing or engaging participants into harmful practices. While this may seem obvious, you may not even realize you are harming your participants because you believe the action is necessary for the research process.

For example, commonly teachers want to try out an intervention that will potentially positively impact their students. When the teacher sets up the action research study, they may have a control group and an experimental group. There is potential to impair the learning of one of these groups if the intervention is either highly impactful or exceedingly worse than the typical instruction. Therefore, teachers can sometimes overlook the potential harm to students in pursuing an experimental method of exploring an intervention.

If you are working with a university researcher, ethical concerns will be covered by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). If not, your school or district may have a process or form that you would need to complete, so it would beneficial to check your district policies before starting. Other widely accepted aspects of doing ethically informed research, include:

Confirm Awareness of Study and Negotiate Access – with authorities, participants and parents, guardians, caregivers and supervisors (with IRB this is done with Informed Consent).

• Promise to Uphold Confidentiality – Uphold confidentiality, to your fullest ability, to protect information, identity and data. You can identify people if they indicate they want to be recognized for their contributions.
• Ensure participants’ rights to withdraw from the study at any point .
• Make sure data is secured, either on password protected computer or lock drawer .

Prepare to Problematize your Thinking

Educational researchers who are more philosophically-natured emphasize that research is not about finding solutions, but instead is about creating and asking new and more precise questions. This is represented in the action research process shown in the diagrams in Chapter 1, as Collingwood (1939) notes the aim in human interaction is always to keep the conversation open, while Edward Said (1997) emphasized that there is no end because whatever we consider an end is actually the beginning of something entirely new. These reflections have perspective in evaluating the quality in research and signifying what is “good” in “good pedagogy” and “good research”. If we consider that action research is about studying and reflecting on one’s learning and how that learning influences practice to improve it, there is nothing to stop your line of inquiry as long as you relate it to improving practice. This is why it is necessary to problematize and scrutinize our practices.

Ethical Dilemmas for Educator-Researchers

Classroom teachers are increasingly expected to demonstrate a disposition of reflection and inquiry into their own practice. Many advocate for schools to become research centers, and to produce their own research studies, which is an important advancement in acknowledging and addressing the complexity in today’s schools. When schools conduct their own research studies without outside involvement, they bypass outside controls over their studies. Schools shift power away from the oversight of outside experts and ethical research responsibilities are shifted to those conducting the formal research within their educational context. Ethics firmly grounded and established in school policies and procedures for teaching, becomes multifaceted when teaching practice and research occur simultaneously. When educators conduct research in their classrooms, are they doing so as teachers or as researchers, and if they are researchers, at what point does the teaching role change to research? Although the notion of objectivity is a key element in traditional research paradigms, educator-based research acknowledges a subjective perspective as the educator-researcher is not viewed separately from the research. In action research, unlike traditional research, the educator as researcher gains access to the research site by the nature of the work they are paid and expected to perform. The educator is never detached from the research and remains at the research site both before and after the study. Because studying one’s practice comprises working with other people, ethical deliberations are inevitable. Educator-researchers confront role conflict and ambiguity regarding ethical issues such as informed consent from participants, protecting subjects (students) from harm, and ensuring confidentiality. They must demonstrate a commitment toward fully understanding ethical dilemmas that present themselves within the unique set of circumstances of the educational context. Questions about research ethics can feel exceedingly complex and in specific situations, educator- researchers require guidance from others.

Think about it this way. As a part-time historian and former history teacher I often problematized who we regard as good and bad people in history. I (Clark) grew up minutes from Jesse James’ childhood farm. Jesse James is a well-documented thief, and possibly by today’s standards, a terrorist. He is famous for daylight bank robberies, as well as the sheer number of successful robberies. When Jesse James was assassinated, by a trusted associate none-the-less, his body travelled the country for people to see, while his assailant and assailant’s brother reenacted the assassination over 1,200 times in theaters across the country. Still today in my hometown, they reenact Jesse James’ daylight bank robbery each year at the Fall Festival, immortalizing this thief and terrorist from our past. This demonstrates how some people saw him as somewhat of hero, or champion of some sort of resistance, both historically and in the present. I find this curious and ripe for further inquiry, but primarily it is problematic for how we think about people as good or bad in the past. Whatever we may individually or collectively think about Jesse James as a “good” or “bad” person in history, it is vitally important to problematize our thinking about him. Talking about Jesse James may seem strange, but it is relevant to the field of action research. If we tell people that we are engaging in important and “good” actions, we should be prepared to justify why it is “good” and provide a theoretical, epistemological, or ontological rationale if possible. Experience is never enough, you need to justify why you act in certain ways and not others, and this includes thinking critically about your own thinking.

Educators who view inquiry and research as a facet of their professional identity must think critically about how to design and conduct research in educational settings to address respect, justice, and beneficence to minimize harm to participants. This chapter emphasized the due diligence involved in ethically planning the collection of data, and in considering the challenges faced by educator-researchers in educational contexts.

Planning Action

After the thinking about the considerations above, you are now at the stage of having selected a topic and reflected on different aspects of that topic. You have undertaken a literature review and have done some reading which has enriched your understanding of your topic. As a result of your reading and further thinking, you may have changed or fine-tuned the topic you are exploring. Now it is time for action. In the last section of this chapter, we will address some practical issues of carrying out action research, drawing on both personal experiences of supervising educator-researchers in different settings and from reading and hearing about action research projects carried out by other researchers.

Engaging in an action research can be a rewarding experience, but a beneficial action research project does not happen by accident – it requires careful planning, a flexible approach, and continuous educator-researcher reflection. Although action research does not have to go through a pre-determined set of steps, it is useful here for you to be aware of the progression which we presented in Chapter 2. The sequence of activities we suggested then could be looked on as a checklist for you to consider before planning the practical aspects of your project.

We also want to provide some questions for you to think about as you are about to begin.

• Have you identified a topic for study?
• What is the specific context for the study? (It may be a personal project for you or for a group of researchers of which you are a member.)
• Have you read a sufficient amount of the relevant literature?
• Have you developed your research question(s)?
• Have you assessed the resource needed to complete the research?

As you start your project, it is worth writing down:

• a working title for your project, which you may need to refine later;
• the background of the study , both in terms of your professional context and personal motivation;
• the aims of the project;
• the specific outcomes you are hoping for.

Although most of the models of action research presented in Chapter 1 suggest action taking place in some pre-defined order, they also allow us the possibility of refining our ideas and action in the light of our experiences and reflections. Changes may need to be made in response to your evaluation and your reflections on how the project is progressing. For example, you might have to make adjustments, taking into account the students’ responses, your observations and any observations of your colleagues. All this is very useful and, in fact, it is one of the features that makes action research suitable for educational research.

Action research planning sheet

In the past, we have provided action researchers with the following planning list that incorporates all of these considerations. Again, like we have said many times, this is in no way definitive, or lock-in-step procedure you need to follow, but instead guidance based on our perspective to help you engage in the action research process. The left column is the simplified version, and the right column offers more specific advice if need.

Figure 4.1 Planning Sheet for Action Research

Action Research Copyright © by J. Spencer Clark; Suzanne Porath; Julie Thiele; and Morgan Jobe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Action Research Report

Report generator.

More academic institutions are coming to terms with the idea that education is not a one-size-fits-all system. However, an issue with the new teaching methods is that we can’t keep employing diverse techniques without the certainty of its effectiveness to improve learning. Changing a system that has stuck with the same blueprint for over a hundred years can only be done when we have sufficient proof that the proposed changes are better. Today, we can find that proof in action research reports.

Action research is a systematic inquiry and evaluation of the initiatives on improving practice, curriculum, or interaction. This is generally done by people in the respective fields. It is best known in education, where it validates the effectiveness of a learning method.

In contrast to some of the more traditional research methods, action research doesn’t remove the subject from its natural environment. Investigation occurs in the context of which the subject exists. Whereas, traditional research often extracts the subject into an observable vacuum or controls its environment.

An Antiquated System

The Industrializing Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is fundamentally new energy sources, like coal, oil, and natural gas, making way for automated work and better modes of transportation that carried the world to where it is now. As societies transformed, so did our priorities. We saw better opportunities in working for industries and started leaving farms and fields in search of greener pastures.

In an industrializing society, we placed priority on market production and economic value. This view reflects how we designed our schools to raise children for this kind of environment. Education wasn’t about learning and celebrating one’s individuality. Schooling was similar to mass production in factories: the cookie-cutter model of learning.

The Factory Setting

Over a century has passed, and there are still schools in the country that follow this blueprint from over a hundred years ago. The linear information transfer teaching method encourages a role-play between the teacher, who is the authoritative figure, and the students, the submissive figure. Schools give the students a rigid template of learning, and the latter should conform to the set structure or be labeled a failure. This format is void of authentic classroom engagement and multi-directional interaction, which plays a large part in learning.

The education system during the Industrial Revolution was essentially about schools producing a qualified labor force with the proper work ethic. But, it did give us 12 years of free public education. At its core, the system brought education for all. 

Reset by Research

Today, we are making significant strides in encouraging authentic learning in schools. Academic institutions have looked into teaching methods and classroom models that free students from outdated assumptions of instruction. Educators should update their planners on how to best deliver education to their students.

Educational Revolution

Educators are integrating interactive technology into their lesson plans . Teachers are experimenting with different methods of instruction in and out of the classrooms. Some schools are using tablets and computers for teaching. Schools are also redesigning their spaces, like classrooms and libraries, to foster 21st-century learning. These changes aren’t based on spur-of-the-moment assumptions but on what research papers reported about learning.

According to research , classes that are taking advantage of collaborative learning encourage students to be more participative in the discussion. Active engagement also hones leadership skills, communication, and critical thinking. Schools are adopting peer learning because of the positive effect of student-teach-student on the understanding of a concept.

On that thought, schools are also rethinking the design of the physical learning spaces to house learning. A study states that classroom design influences student engagement and allows for active learning strategies. Other academic spaces, like libraries, can also benefit from restructuring makes studying conducive for students.

4+ Action Research Report Examples

The following are examples of action research reports that you can use as guides in preparing your research.

1. Teacher Action Research Report Example

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2. Action Research Project Report Example

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3. Action College Research Report Example

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4. Action Research Programme Report Example

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Writing Your Action Research Report

In exploring different teaching methods and learning strategies, educators should also monitor and evaluate the progress of each method for effectiveness. While a research plan can work in theory, action research reports let you see the real effect of the method.

1. Spot a Problem

First, you have to identify an issue that you wish to address. There are a handful of problems in the educational system, and several of these may be plaguing your school. Although you might want to solve them all, focus on one problem at a time. When you have identified a specific issue, you can research on applicable theories that can help you create a solution. The problem with dealing with multiple issues is that it can be confusing, and you might lose focus.

2. Plan your Steps

You can utilize an action plan for this. Include in the document how you intend to design and frame your study. Indicate the research methodology and justify your strategy. Identify the sampling frame and sample size of your research. Because action research investigates a subject in the natural environment, it is important to select participants that are part of that environment. Before you begin your research, you should already have a sound mental map of how the study will unfold.

3. Gather Relevant Data

How do you quantify learning to know if the learning strategy is effective? It can be hard to remain objective in describing success. In this case, you can use different types of data gathering. Look at your data through different perspectives. You can use data from observations, class records , and interviews with the participants. This approach is known as the Triangulation Method, and it helps in the overall confidence of your results.

4. Implement and Monitor

Carry out your plan and keep tabs on the progress of the study using Gantt charts . Using your success indicators and the performance criteria you opted to use, determine if the learning strategy helped the students in their academic performance and classroom behavior. The assessment portion of the study is a crucial part since it can provide a definitive evaluation of the strategy you employed.

Through research, we are reinventing education by acknowledging what schools failed to understand for over a century. Be part of this educational revolution one action paper at a time.

Text prompt

• Instructive
• Professional

Generate a report on the impact of technology in the classroom on student learning outcomes

Prepare a report analyzing the trends in student participation in sports and arts programs over the last five years at your school.

Probllama: Ollama Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2024-37032) – Overview and Mitigations

Wiz Research discovered CVE-2024-37032, an easy-to-exploit Remote Code Execution vulnerability in the open-source AI Infrastructure project Ollama.

Introduction & Overview 

Ollama is one of the most popular open-source projects for running AI Models, with over 70k stars on GitHub and hundreds of thousands of monthly pulls on Docker Hub . Inspired by Docker, Ollama aims to simplify the process of packaging and deploying AI models. 

Wiz Research discovered an easy-to-exploit Remote Code Execution vulnerability in Ollama: CVE-2024-37032, dubbed “Probllama.” This security issue was responsibly disclosed to Ollama’s maintainers and has since been mitigated. Ollama users are encouraged to upgrade their Ollama installation to version 0.1.34 or newer. 

Our research indicates that, as of June 10, there are a large number of Ollama instances running a vulnerable version that are exposed to the internet. In this blog post, we will detail what we found and how we found it, as well as mitigation techniques and preventative measures organizations can take moving forward.  

AI Security Takeaways 

Taken as a whole – and in light of the Wiz Research team’s ongoing focus on the risk inherent to AI systems – our findings underscore the fact that AI security measure s have been largely sidelined in favor of focusing on the transformative power of this technology, and its potential to revolutionize the way business gets done.  

Organizations are rapidly adopting a variety of new AI tools and infrastructure in an attempt to hone their competitive edge. These tools are often at an early stage of development and lack standardized security features, such as authentication. Additionally, due to their young code base, it is relatively easier to find critical software vulnerabilities, making them perfect targets for potential threat actors. This is a recurring theme in our discoveries – see prior Wiz Research work on AI-as-a-service-providers Hugging Face and Replicate , as well as our State of AI in the Cloud report and last year’s discovery of 38TB of data that was accidentally leaked by AI researchers.  

Over the past year, multiple remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities were identified in inference servers, including TorchServe, Ray Anyscale, and Ollama. These vulnerabilities could allow attackers to take over self-hosted AI inference servers, steal or modify AI models, and compromise AI applications.  

The critical issue is not just the vulnerabilities themselves but the inherent lack of authentication support in these new tools. If exposed to the internet, any attacker can connect to them, steal or modify the AI models, or even execute remote code as a built-in feature (as seen with TorchServe and Ray Anyscale ). The lack of authentication support means these tools should never be exposed externally without protective middleware, such as a reverse proxy with authentication. Despite this, when scanning the internet for exposed Ollama servers, our scan revealed over 1,000 exposed instances hosting numerous AI models, including private models not listed in the Ollama public repository, highlighting a significant security gap. 

CROC Talks: RCE Vulnerability in Ollama explained

RCE Vulnerability in Ollama explained

Mitigation & detection 

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must send specially crafted HTTP requests to the Ollama API server. In the default Linux installation , the API server binds to localhost, which reduces remote exploitation risk significantly. However, in docker deployments ( ollama/ollama ), the API server is publicly exposed , and therefore could be exploited remotely. 

Wiz customers can use the pre-built query and advisory in the Wiz Threat Center to search for vulnerable instances in their environment. 

Explanation and Technical Description 

Why research ollama .

Our research team makes an active effort to contribute to the security of AI services, tooling, and infrastructure, and we also use AI in our research work. 

For a different project, we looked to leverage a large-context AI model. Luckily, around that time, Gradient released their Llama3 version which has a context of 1m tokens .  

Being one of the most popular open-source projects for running AI Models with over 70k stars on GitHub and hundreds of thousands of monthly pulls on Docker Hub , Ollama seemed to be the simplest way to self-host that model 😊. 

 Ollama Architecture 

Ollama consists of two main components: a client and a server. The server exposes multiple APIs to perform core functions, such as pulling a model from the registry, generating a prediction for a given prompt, etc. The client is what the user interacts with (i.e. the front-end), which could be, for example, a CLI (command-line interface). 

While experimenting with Ollama, our team found a critical security vulnerability in an Ollama server. Due to insufficient input validation, it is possible to exploit a Path Traversal vulnerability to arbitrarily overwrite files on the server. This can be further exploited into a full Remote Code Execution as we demonstrate below. 

This issue is extremely severe in Docker installations, as the server runs with root privileges and listens on 0.0.0.0 by default – which enables remote exploitation of this vulnerability. 

It is important to mention that Ollama does not support authentication out-of-the-box. It is generally recommended to deploy Ollama behind a reverse-proxy to enforce authentication, if the user decides to expose its installation. In practice, our research indicates that there are a large number of installations exposed to the internet without any sort of authentication. 

The Vulnerability: Arbitrary File Write via Path Traversal 

Ollama’s HTTP server exposes multiple API endpoints that perform various actions.  

One of the endpoints, /api/pull , can be used to download a model from an Ollama registry. 

By default, models are downloaded from Ollama’s official registry ( registry.ollama.com ), however, it is also possible to fetch models from private registries.

While Ollama's official registry can be considered "trusted," anyone can set up their own registry and host models on it. As researchers, we were interested in this attack surface – are private registries being blindly trusted? What damage could a malicious private registry cause? 

What we found is that when pulling a model from a private registry (by querying the http://[victim]:11434/api/pull API endpoint), it is possible to supply a malicious manifest file that contains a path traversal payload in the digest field. 

The digest field of a given layer should be equal to the hash of the layer. Among other things, the digest of the layer is also used to store the model file on the disk:  

/root/.ollama/models/blobs/sha256-04778965089b91318ad61d0995b7e44fad4b9a9f4e049d7be90932bf8812e828

However, we found that the digest field was used without proper validation, resulting in path traversal when attempting to store it on the filesystem. This issue can be exploited to corrupt arbitrary files on the system. 

Achieving Arbitrary File Read 

By exploiting the previous issue, we can plant an additional malicious manifest file on the server (e.g /root/.ollama/models/manifests/%ATTACKER_IP%/library/manifest/latest ), which effectively registers a new model to the server. We found out that if our model’s manifest contains a traversal payload for the digest of one of its layers, when attempting to push this model to a remote registry via the http://[victim]:11434/api/push endpoint, the server will leak the content of the file specified in the digest field. 

Finally, Remote Code Execution 

As we mentioned previously, it is possible to exploit the Arbitrary File Write vulnerability to corrupt certain files in the system. In Docker installations, it is pretty straightforward to exploit it and achieve Remote Code Execution , as the server runs with root privileges. 

The simplest way we thought of achieving remote-code-execution would be to corrupt ld.so configuration files, specifically /etc/ld.so.preload . This file contains a whitespace - separated list of shared libraries that should be loaded whenever a new process starts. Using our Arbitrary File Write exploit-primitive, we plant our payload as a shared library on the filesystem ( /root/bad.so ) and then we corrupt etc/ld.so.preload to include it. Finally, we query the /api/chat endpoint on the Ollama API Server, which subsequently creates a new process and thus loads our payload! 

Regarding exploitation of instances which do not run with root privileges - we do have a strategy for exploitation that leverages our /Arbitrary File Read primitive. However, it will be left as an exercise for the reader 😊 

Conclusions 

 CVE-2024-37032 is an easy-to-exploit remote code execution that affects modern AI infrastructure. Despite the codebase being relatively new and written in modern programming languages, classic vulnerabilities such as Path Traversal remain an issue. 

Security teams should update their Ollama instances to the latest version to mitigate this vulnerability. Furthermore, it is recommended not to expose Ollama to the internet unless it is protected by some sort of authentication mechanism, such a reverse-proxy. 

Responsible disclosure timeline 

We responsibly disclosed this vulnerability to Ollama’s development team in May 2024. Ollama promptly investigated and addressed the issue while keeping us updated. 

May 5, 2024 – Wiz Research reported the issue to Ollama.

May 5, 2024 – Ollama acknowledged the receipt of the report. 

May 5, 2024 – Ollama notified Wiz Research that they committed a fix to GitHub. 

May 8, 2024 – Ollama released a patched version. 

June 24, 2024 – Wiz Research published a blog about the issue. 

Ollama committed a fix in about 4 hours after receiving our initial report, demonstrating an impressive response time and commitment to their product security. 

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