What Is Data Analysis?

In their book about teacher inquiry, Ruth Shagoury and Brenda Miller Power describe data analysis as “finding the patterns within your data, viewing each bit of information as part of a larger puzzle you must put together…” (p. 136). While we’ll talk a lot more about data analysis in Lesson 6 of this course, this lesson should give us enough information to give it a try.

During this stage of inquiry, we take a closer look at the data we’ve collected and think about what we’re seeing—and not seeing. This part of the process is often the complex and the most uncomfortable for new teacher-researchers. However, if we’re willing to embrace the messiness of this stage, it can be the most interesting and rewarding part of our work!

We will talk about this in four steps:

1. Description
2. Sense Making
3. Interpretation
4. Implications

The following activity will walk you through each of these steps.

---

References

Shagoury, R., & Power, B. M. (2012). Living the questions: A guide for teacher-researchers (Second Edition). Stenhouse Publishers.

Dana, N. F., & Yendol-Hoppey, D. (2019). The reflective educator′s guide to classroom research: Learning to teach and teaching to learn through practitioner inquiry (Fourth Edition). Corwin.