Action Research in the Classroom: Key Points to Keep in Mind

It has been for more than two decades that action research has entered the educational settings of Iran, and teachers are encouraged to incorporate action research into their career both as a means to find concrete solutions to the problems they face in the classroom context with the aim of improving their practice and as a means to contribute to their professional development through providing them with opportunities for planned reflection on their practice. Despite this rather long time of focus on action research in the Iranian school context, there still seems to be some misconceptions and vague points about action research and its distinction from other types of research especially applied and classroom oriented research. This paper aims at reviewing some of the issues in action research and shedding some light on its controversial aspects.