GM505 Unit 10 Financial Aid Action Research Cycle Example

Fewer Calls, Then a New Kind: A Unit 10 Action Research Cycle Report From a Financial Aid Office

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM505: Action Research and Consulting Skills

Unit 10 Action Research Cycle Report

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The college, its staff, its students and every figure are composite and illustrative; the frameworks and sources cited are real.

Figure 1: The Cycle

Figure 1 draws the five-phase cycle Gerald Susman and Roger Evered set out, with the client system at its center and each turn leading into the next (Susman & Evered, 1978). Each section below summarizes the phase and points to the earlier deliverable that holds the detail.

Diagnosing

The diagnosis, reported in Unit 4, tested three explanations for student complaints about the phones. Coded calls, traced files and observation at the processing desk found that the largest cause was the document process itself: a request letter students could not act on, producing incomplete uploads, a longer queue and repeat status calls that advisors could not answer because the processor's notes were invisible to them. Advisor courtesy contributed in a small way, and volume was mostly a consequence of the process.

Action Planning

The intervention design in Unit 5 proposed three linked changes: a request letter rewritten with six students and two advisors, one-line status notes added by the processor at each review and a daily ten-minute huddle between the processor and the advisors on the phones. Every element was tested against whether the office could sustain it in the busiest week of October. The data gathering plan in Unit 8 set the measures, the comparison with the south campus and the thresholds that would count as failure.

Action Taking

This section describes what happened, not what was planned. The rewritten letter went out to every north campus student selected for verification in the first week of October. The huddle ran on nineteen of twenty working days; it was skipped once when the director was out and nobody started it. The status notes were added consistently for three weeks. In the fourth week, a south campus processor resigned, and the north campus processor covered both queues for six days. Status notes fell to about 40 percent of reviews that week. Advisors noticed at once, because status calls they could have answered became calls they had to return.

Evaluating

The measures, compared with the south campus, showed the pilot working on its main targets. Repeat document calls on the north campus dropped by roughly three eighths while the south barely moved, complete first uploads rose by twenty-three points against a one-point fall on the south, and files reached a processor a day and a half sooner. The feedback report in Unit 9 gives the weekly figures. All three passed the failure thresholds set in advance.

But the call coding also showed something nobody predicted. A category that barely existed before, students calling to confirm that an upload had arrived, appeared during the pilot: 64 calls over four weeks on the north campus, about 9 per hundred students with open files. In the fourth week, when status notes lapsed, the count doubled.

The letter taught students what to send, which was the problem it was designed to solve; it could not tell them whether what they sent had arrived, which became the next problem.

Reflecting

The reflection distinguishes two problems the pilot had blurred. The first was comprehension: students did not understand what to send. The letter fixed that, as the rise in complete first submissions shows. The second was confirmation: students did not know whether the office had received what they sent. Before the pilot, confirmation calls were hidden inside the broader status calls, because students rarely got far enough to send the right document. Once more students sent the right document, the question of whether it had arrived became the main reason left to call.

The lapse in week four was also informative. It showed that status notes depend on one person, so the intervention as designed was fragile in exactly the way the October test was meant to catch, though the cause was a vacancy rather than volume.

Specifying Learning

What the office learned. The office learned that most of its phone traffic during verification is produced by its own process, that small changes to that process reduce it substantially and that each fix may reveal a problem the previous one was hiding. The office has adopted the letter and the status notes on both campuses for spring, and the dean chose Option B from the feedback report, permitting booked return calls during peak weeks so that two advisors can staff the file help desk.

What I learned. I began this engagement having proposed callbacks the previous spring and been turned down. The dean's decision might look like vindication, but I think the lesson is different. The callback idea succeeded this time because it arrived as one option among three, after the office and the dean had agreed on what the problem was. Edgar Schein's distinction between selling expertise and helping a client understand its own situation (Schein, 1999), which I used in the first unit to explain the earlier rejection, turned out to describe the whole engagement. Insider research asks the researcher to treat her own position as data (Coghlan & Brannick, 2014), and I learned how much my own expectations shaped the diagnosis, which the reflexivity analysis records, and how the data gathering safeguards kept those expectations from shaping the evaluation.

The Revised Plan for Cycle Two

The second cycle will address confirmation. Three changes are planned. The upload portal will send an automatic receipt email listing each document received. A second staff member, the south campus processor's replacement, will be trained to add status notes, so the practice no longer depends on one person. And the huddle will include a two-minute review of the previous day's confirmation calls. The measures from cycle one will continue, with confirmation calls added as a fourth. A threshold for the new measure is set now, before spring data arrive: confirmation calls should fall below 3 per hundred students with open files, or the receipt email will be redesigned.

Conclusion

The first cycle reduced repeat document calls and raised first-submission completeness on the north campus, and the dean changed the live-answer rule for peak weeks. It also uncovered confirmation calls, a problem the original process had hidden. Action research, as Kurt Lewin described it, treats each cycle as a step that both changes a situation and teaches the people involved what to try next (Lewin, 1946). This cycle did both, and the second begins in January.

References

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). Sage.

Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34-46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1946.tb02295.x

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.

Susman, G. I., & Evered, R. D. (1978). An assessment of the scientific merits of action research. Administrative Science Quarterly, 23(4), 582-603. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392581