This book is about the field of action research and is aimed at practitioners, specifically in the field of education, who are keen on making their own enquiries into improving their learnings and explaining how and why they wish to do that. They describe how research done by practitioners(about their own practice), while capable of generating further new and informed practice, is considered to be incapable of generating quality theory, by the research community at large. They give the example of the educational research community in the UK and describe how, while some steps towards formally accepting practitioner research have been taken (as mentioned in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise), practitioners are held back by the lack of established forms of judgement of quality which stand up to the norms of academic rigour. This is owed to the continuing dominance of social sciences as dominant paradigm in educational research.