Research Details

Philippine education faces a persistent learning crisis, documented across three consecutive reports of the Second Congressional Commission on Education. Teacher education institutions carry a central responsibility in preparing practitioners who can diagnose and address learning deficits through systematic inquiry. Classroom-based action research (CBAR) embedded in student-teaching internships offers one structured pathway toward this goal. This study synthesizes four consecutive years of CBAR outputs from the Mariano Marcos State University College of Teacher Education (MMSU-CTE) covering AY 2022-2026. It pursues two research questions: (RQ1) What themes and trends emerge across academic years in research topics, methodological approaches, student-researcher reflections, and suggestions/recommendations? (RQ2) How can these themes and trends inform future directions of CBAR within MMSU-CTE? The corpus consisted of 73 studies drawn from four institutional CBAR meta-analysis matrices, spanning eight teacher education programs. Quantitative analysis produced frequency counts and percentage distributions. Qualitative thematic synthesis followed Braun and Clarke's six-phase protocol. AI-assisted initial aggregation using NotebookLM was subjected to full manual validation. Digital gamification and engagement-centered interventions dominated research topics across all four years (38%). Mixed-methods designs increased from 45% in AY 2022-2023 to 67% in AY 2025-2026, indicating progressive methodological sophistication. Student-researcher reflections clustered around four categories: dissonance-as-catalyst, relational pedagogy, institutional critique, and professional identity formation. Recommendations consistently called for scale expansion, longitudinal follow-up, and policy-level adoption, but evidence of institutional uptake remained sparse. CBAR at MMSU-CTE has moved from technical execution toward critical participatory orientations. The gap between what interns recommend and what institutions adopt constitutes the most urgent structural problem requiring the activation of communicative spaces for sustained reform.