Almost every action research, thesis and BERF proposal in basic education cites a DepEd order. Yet the APA Publication Manual has no example for one: its government examples are American, and DepEd’s own documents cite orders in at least four different ways. This guide gives a consistent APA 7 format for DepEd orders, memoranda, regional and division memoranda, Philippine laws, the Action Research Toolkit, data sets and AI tools, with real examples you can copy. It ends with the other part of the report people struggle to write: the abstract.

It is written for teachers and school heads writing action research and BERF reports, and for graduate students.

Key points

  • Treat a DepEd order as a report by a government agency. Author: Department of Education. Year. Title in sentence case, then the order number in parentheses. Then the URL.
  • In text: (Department of Education [DepEd], 2017) the first time, then (DepEd, 2017).
  • Two orders from the same year become 2017a and 2017b, ordered by title.
  • Laws use legal style, not report style: Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, Rep. Act No. 10533 (2013) (Phil.).
  • APA 7 is not APA 6. Three or more authors take “et al.” from the first citation; drop the publisher’s city and “Retrieved from”. The toolkit’s examples still follow APA 6.
  • Declare AI use. DepEd Order No. 003, s. 2026 requires personnel to declare AI tools used in research, and asks that citations of AI use name the tool and the prompt and link to the chat.
  • The abstract is 200 to 250 words that summarize the problem, the intervention, the participants, the methods and the results, with numbers.

Does DepEd require APA style?

Not by name. The Research Management Guidelines (DO 16, s. 2017) require “appropriate referencing and citation” in the proposal and the final report, include an anti-plagiarism declaration, and score proposals partly on whether the “citation of literature sources is consistent”. The Action Research Toolkit asks for “a consistent citation style” and gives its examples in APA. Check what your division, region or graduate school asks for. If it names no style, APA 7 is the safe choice, and consistency is what reviewers check.

Why a DepEd order needs a decision

APA 7 gives reference formats for government reports and for U.S. laws, but not for executive issuances of other countries. DepEd’s own documents show the result:

  • The Action Research Toolkit writes “Department of Education. 2017. Research Management Guidelines. DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2017.”, an author-date style closer to Chicago than APA.
  • The toolkit cites one memorandum, DM 144, s. 2017 (Supplemental Research Guides and Tools), four ways in different sections: “DepEd Order No. 144”, “DepEd Memorandum No. 144”, “DM 144” and “DepEd Memo 144”. The first is wrong: it is a memorandum, not an order.
  • DO 003, s. 2026 lists “Department of Education. (2017). DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2017. Research Management Guidelines (RMG).” beside entries in other styles.

The format below follows APA 7’s rules for reports by a government agency: the agency as group author, the title in italics and sentence case, and the document’s number in parentheses after the title, as APA does with report numbers.

The format for a DepEd order

Department of Education. (Year). Title of the order in sentence case (DepEd Order No. X, s. Year). URL

“s. 2017” means “series of 2017”: orders are numbered from 1 each year. Write the number as it appears on the order: older orders have no leading zeros (DO 16, s. 2017), while recent ones do (DO 003, s. 2026).

Examples:

Sentence case means capitalizing only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns. “K to 12 Basic Education Program” keeps its capitals because it is a program’s name; “learning action cell” does not.

Use the official copy. Link to the order on deped.gov.ph, not to a copy on a blog or a file-sharing site. APA 7 needs no “Retrieved from” and no access date for a document that will not change.

Memoranda, regional and division issuances

The same pattern works for every DepEd issuance. Change the document type in the parentheses, and make the office that issued it the author.

DepEd memorandum:

Regional memorandum: the regional office is the author.

Division memorandum: the schools division office is the author.

  • Schools Division of [City or Province]. (Year). Title in sentence case (Division Memorandum No. X, s. Year). URL

Write the office’s name as it appears on the memorandum’s letterhead, and spell it the same way in every entry.

In-text citations

Situation Parenthetical Narrative
First citation (Department of Education [DepEd], 2017) The Department of Education (DepEd, 2017) requires…
Later citations (DepEd, 2017) DepEd (2017) requires…
Naming the order in the sentence DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2017 (DepEd, 2017) defines…
Two orders from the same year (DepEd, 2017a, 2017b) DepEd (2017a) and DepEd (2017b)…
A direct quotation (DepEd, 2017, p. 3) DepEd (2017) requires “…” (p. 3).

APA 7 suggests introducing an abbreviation such as DepEd only if you use it at least three times. In the reference list, always write the full name, “Department of Education”, never the abbreviation.

Same author, same year. If you cite DO 42, s. 2017 (the Philippine Professional Standards for Teachers) and DO 16, s. 2017, add letters to the year, assigned by the alphabetical order of the titles:

“National” comes before “Research”, so the PPST order is 2017a, whatever the order numbers.

A note on “Department of Education”. Other countries also have one. In a paper for an international journal, you may write “Department of Education (Philippines)” as the author to avoid confusion. This is a suggestion, not an APA rule.

Philippine laws

APA 7 cites laws in legal (Bluebook) style, and its examples are American. A common adaptation for Philippine laws:

In text: (Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, 2013), or in the sentence, “Republic Act No. 10533, the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, …” Legal references are not italicized in the reference list. Link to the Official Gazette copy.

Other sources action researchers cite

The Action Research Toolkit. The cover shows DepEd and the Basic Education Sector Transformation (BEST) Program, which published it in 2019 with support from the Australian Government:

  • Department of Education & Basic Education Sector Transformation Program. (2019). Action research toolkit: Teacher’s guide.

Cite the facilitator’s guide as a separate entry if you use it.

A data set. APA 7 adds “[Data set]” after the title. For the cleaned classroom data used in our posts:

Your school’s own records, such as SF 2 attendance or class records, are usually not cited in the reference list. Describe them in the methods section, as data sources.

AI tools. The APA Style team’s guidance on citing ChatGPT uses this pattern:

Company. (Year). Name of the tool (Version) [Large language model]. URL

DepEd adds its own rules. Under DO 003, s. 2026:

  • AI in data and research is limited to “ancillary support functions, such as the analysis of processed data, grammatical refinement, and citation verification”.
  • Personnel must “formally declare all AI tools employed in data processing” using the declaration form in the order’s Annex A.
  • Submitting research papers “generated, in whole or in part, by AI without significant human contribution and proper disclosure is strictly forbidden”.
  • Citations of AI use should identify the tool and the prompt and include a link to the chat history.
  • Personal and sensitive information must never be entered into AI systems.

APA 7 changes the toolkit does not have

The toolkit’s citation examples, written in 2019, follow APA’s sixth edition: its rule for three to five authors, the publisher’s city and “Retrieved from” all come from it. What changed in the seventh edition:

APA 6 APA 7
Three to five authors: all names the first time, (Nugent, Malik, & Hollingsworth, 2012), then (Nugent et al., 2012) Three or more authors: (Nugent et al., 2012) from the first citation
Publisher’s city: Boston, MA: Pearson Publisher only: Pearson
“Retrieved from https://…” The URL alone, unless you need a retrieval date for a page that changes
Up to seven authors in the reference list Up to 20 authors
DOI written as “doi:10…” DOI written as a link: https://doi.org/10…

Writing the abstract

The toolkit (section 6.2) calls the abstract the “research-in-miniature”: 200 to 250 words that summarize the sampling, data collection and analysis methods and the final results, and that guide readers to the parts they want. DepEd’s minimum requirements for a completed action research report (Annex 6 of DO 16, s. 2017) put it right after the title page.

Write it last, from the finished report, in the past tense.

The parts, in order:

  1. The problem, in one or two sentences, with evidence.
  2. The intervention and the purpose of the study.
  3. The participants and the design: who, how many, where, and for how long.
  4. The data collection and analysis: the instruments and the statistical or thematic analysis.
  5. The results, with the main numbers: means, the test statistic, the p-value and the effect size, or the main themes.
  6. The conclusion and the action: what the results mean and what the school will do next.

A sample abstract (invented study, 234 words)

Learners who cannot read fluently fall behind in every subject. This action research tested whether ten minutes of daily repeated reading would improve the oral reading fluency of Grade 3 learners reading below grade level in a public elementary school. Thirty-two learners identified through the Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment took part for eight weeks in the second half of School Year 2025–2026. The study used a one-group pretest-posttest design with a qualitative component. Fluency was measured as words correct per minute on grade-level passages before and after the intervention and compared with a paired t-test. Eight learners and their parents were interviewed, and their answers were analyzed thematically. Mean fluency rose from 41.3 to 55.8 words correct per minute, a gain of 14.5, t(31) = 6.12, p < 0.001, d = 1.08. Learners who started lowest gained the most, partly a sign of regression to the mean, which a one-group design cannot rule out. The interviews showed three themes: growing confidence in reading aloud, the value of a predictable daily routine, and little reading practice at home. The results suggest that daily repeated reading is a low-cost way to build fluency, but a study with a comparison group is needed to confirm its effect. The school will extend the routine to all Grade 3 sections in the next school year and send home weekly reading passages so that parents can practice with their children.

What makes it work: every part of the report is there in a sentence or two; the result has numbers; and it states the design’s limitation instead of hiding it. The full study behind this abstract, with its data, is in Sample Action Research in DepEd Format: A Complete Example.

Formatting

  • In APA 7, the label Abstract is bold and centered at the top of its own page; the text is one paragraph, not indented.
  • Keywords, if your school or journal wants them, go on the line below: Keywords: repeated reading, oral reading fluency, Grade 3, action research.
  • No citations, tables or abbreviations that are not explained.
  • The toolkit adds a rule for the title: capital letters, at most 16 words, in an “inverted pyramid”, with each line shorter than the one above:
DAILY REPEATED READING AND THE ORAL READING
FLUENCY OF GRADE 3 LEARNERS
READING BELOW GRADE LEVEL

Common mistakes

  • Citing an order only by its number in the text, as “(DO 16, s. 2017)”, with no entry in the reference list. If your school prefers that style, follow it, but use it consistently and list the order in the references.
  • Calling a memorandum an order, or the other way round.
  • Abbreviating the author in the reference list as “DepEd”.
  • Title case in reference titles. APA 7 uses sentence case for titles of reports and articles.
  • Linking an unofficial copy of an order instead of deped.gov.ph or the regional or division website that issued it.
  • An abstract without results, or one that only describes what the study “will” do.
  • An abstract over 250 words, or one that spends half its words on background.

Frequently asked questions

How do you cite a DepEd order in APA 7th edition?

Treat it as a report by a government agency: Department of Education. (2017). Research management guidelines (DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2017). URL. In the text, write (Department of Education [DepEd], 2017) the first time and (DepEd, 2017) after that.

How do you cite a DepEd memorandum in APA?

The same way as an order, with the memorandum number in the parentheses: Department of Education. (2025). Title (DepEd Memorandum No. 069, s. 2025). URL. For a regional or division memorandum, the regional office or the schools division is the author.

What is the in-text citation for a DepEd order?

(Department of Education [DepEd], 2017) for the first citation and (DepEd, 2017) for later ones. To name the order in the sentence, write “DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2017 (DepEd, 2017)”.

How long is the abstract of an action research?

200 to 250 words, according to DepEd’s Action Research Toolkit, which calls it the “research-in-miniature”. It summarizes the methods and the final results.

Do I need to cite AI tools in my action research?

Yes. DepEd Order No. 003, s. 2026 requires personnel to declare AI tools used in research and data processing, forbids research papers produced by AI without significant human contribution and proper disclosure, and asks that citations of AI use identify the tool and the prompt and link to the chat.

More on DepEd research

Sources

Written by Mark Anthony Llego for NASH Reviewer. The sample abstract describes an invented study. NASH Reviewer is not affiliated with DepEd.