ABSTRACT
Increasingly, action research has become a part of funded educational research and curricular development projects. There have been two main arguments for this. The first is that it reduces the time lag between the generation of new knowledge and its application in the classroom. If teachers are the researchers, the time lag may be reduced to zero. The second is that teachers represent a highly educated population who, with proper training, could act as classroom researchers. This offers at least two potential benefits. One is that it could reduce the cost of doing research or development. Teachers would be researchers doing inquiry as a part of their normal practice, with little additional compensation or release time. The other is that teachers spend large amounts of time in schools working with children and are experts at what they do. The inclusion of teachers as researchers in funded projects is a way of utilizing that expertise.
