ABSTRACT
Wherever possible in carrying out your pedagogical action research study, it is a good idea to use instruments that are already published, and there are a good many of them that are readily available, such as the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST), the Assessment Experience Questionnaire (AEQ) and the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI), although sometimes it can be laborious to track down the latest version. Others, such as the Reflections on Learning Inventory (RoLI©) and the Reasoning about Current Issues (RCI) Test, require fees. In all cases you need to acknowledge the authors of the instruments that you are using and cite where they are published. However, by their nature, existing measures are not designed for your own
specific pedagogical action research study, so the purpose of this chapter is to describe how you can develop and adapt your own tools to address your specific research issues. The chapter begins with a section in which I describe three of my own questionnaire-based research tools, the Ideal *** Inventory, the Learning Objectives Questionnaire (LOQ) and the Essay Feedback Checklist (EFC), which you are welcome to use and adapt. In the second and third sections I draw on my own experience in carrying
out pedagogical action research to illustrate how you can adapt both quantitative and qualitative instruments that have been published. In the further resources section at the end of this chapter, I give information on how to access some of the better-known and widely used questionnaires for those readers who would prefer to use established instruments.
