Every public school already holds years of data: attendance in the daily attendance reports, grades in the report cards, movement in the monthly reports, reading levels in the Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment (CRLA), and the school’s own profile in DepEd’s information systems. The Department of Education’s (DepEd) Action Research Toolkit treats such records as a data collection method in their own right (section 4.5, Data Collection Through Documents and Materials), with two tests every document must pass: is it genuine, and is it accurate? Below, those tests are applied to DepEd’s records, with real checks of DepEd’s public data files.

It is written for teachers and school heads who want to use school records in action research, and for researchers using DepEd’s public data.

Key points

  • Documents are data the other methods cannot get. The toolkit’s examples range from assignment notebooks and portfolios to “official and unofficial teacher and/or school records” of enrollment, retention, dropout and promotion.
  • School forms are the backbone. SF1 (school register) to SF10 (permanent academic record) cover enrollment, attendance, movement, promotion, health and nutrition, and grades.
  • External criticism asks whether a document is genuine: who produced it, when, and whether it is the official version.
  • Internal criticism asks whether its content is accurate: do the parts add up, are the values possible, and does it agree with other records?
  • Real checks of DepEd files show both. The CRLA file’s level counts add up in all 38,679 schools; but the school files include 139 public schools reporting learners and no teachers.
  • Get permission, and keep identities confidential. The toolkit’s three ethical practices are proper permission, confidentiality and authenticity.

What counts as a document

The toolkit describes documents and materials as sources that “contain specific information about the research participants that cannot be acquired through paper-and-pencil instruments, interviews, or observations”. It lists:

  • Sources about students: written assignments, projects, student records (anecdotal records, attendance, report cards, test reports) and portfolios.
  • Sources about teachers: lesson plans, classroom observation tools, minutes of meetings, print materials (journals, the school paper, photographs, letters, memos) and nonprint materials (teaching aids, recordings).

It distinguishes primary sources, original outputs that give “direct and firsthand information”, such as report cards, grades, school records of enrollment, retention, dropout and promotion rates, and students’ work, from secondary sources that “explain, examine, clarify, analyze” primary ones, such as reviews, textbooks and summaries. For action research, primary sources are preferred.

DepEd’s records as research data

School forms. DO 58, s. 2017 lists the school forms in use, and DO 11, s. 2018 sets out how they are prepared and checked.

Form What it records Example research uses
SF1, School Register Learners officially enrolled and attending Class composition; learners’ age and background
SF2, Learner’s Daily Attendance Report Each learner’s daily attendance Attendance before and after an intervention; patterns of absence
SF3, Books Issued and Returned Books issued to and returned by learners Access to reading materials
SF4, Monthly Learner Movement and Attendance Learners who transferred in or out or dropped out each month Dropout and transfer studies
SF5, Report on Promotion and Level of Proficiency Learners’ academic performance and assessment results at year end Promotion and proficiency by section
SF6, Summarized Report on Promotion and Level of Proficiency School summary of learner status School-level trends
SF7, School Personnel Assignment List and Basic Profile Personnel profile, teaching assignments and ancillary duties Teaching load and out-of-field teaching
SF8, Learner’s Basic Health and Nutrition Report Learners’ health and nutritional assessment Nutrition and learning; feeding programs
SF9, Learner’s Progress Report Card A learner’s periodic grades Grades before and after an intervention
SF10, Learner’s Permanent Academic Record (formerly Form 137) A learner’s record across the years Learners’ histories, such as repeaters and transferees

Assessment results. The school’s CRLA results by learner and reading level, class records, and item analyses of tests the school gives.

School data. DepEd’s school-level data on enrollment, teachers, classrooms, water and sanitation, and equipment, collected through its information systems and published as open data. NASH Reviewer’s cleaned copies are in Download Cleaned DepEd School Data.

Matching questions to documents. The toolkit’s exercise pairs research questions with documents: students’ diaries for life in a non-traditional home, records from the discipline officer for discipline problems, Senior High School track selections for career programs, and students’ essays in Filipino for grammar difficulties. With school forms:

Research question Documents
Did the attendance of chronically absent learners improve after home visits? SF2 for the months before and after
Which Grade 7 learners left school this year, and when? SF4, with SF1 and SF10
Are learners classified as wasted or severely wasted also behind in reading? SF8 and the CRLA results
How has enrollment in our district’s multigrade schools changed over five years? School enrollment data for each year (the toolkit’s own example uses school report cards)

For the last question, DepEd’s SY 2023-24 school data show 5,974 of 39,346 public schools offering elementary grades (15.2%) with multigrade classes.

External criticism: is the document genuine?

The toolkit defines external criticism as inspecting the “authenticity of documents and materials”, asking “Is the document or material what it looks to be or declares to be?” It checks language and writing style, physical appearance, and authorship. For DepEd records, that becomes:

  • Is it the official version? DO 11, s. 2018 explains that electronic school forms are “pre-loaded with auto-generated information” from the Learner Information System (LIS) and “are not to be modified or edited outside the system or through a spreadsheet”. A form retyped or edited in a spreadsheet is a copy, not the record.
  • Who produced it, and when? Note the office, the date and the school year of every file. For data files, keep the download link and date.
  • Which release is it? DepEd’s CRLA results for SY 2025-26 exist in two releases. The selected-school file put 15.7% of learners at grade level; the end-of-year results put 47.6% at grade level, and in the 6,061 schools found in both, the end-of-year shares are far higher in every grade and language, consistent with the first file being an earlier round (CRLA End-of-Year Results SY 2025-26). Cite the release you used.
  • Whom does it cover? DepEd’s NAT, ELLNA and CRLA files for selected schools cover five regions, 44 of their 63 divisions and about half of the public schools in those divisions, and the selection rule is not published (DepEd Open Data Quality). Results from such files describe the schools in them, not all schools.

Internal criticism: is the content accurate?

Internal criticism concerns “correctness of what a document says”: its meaning and its credibility. The toolkit warns that a genuine document can still be wrong, for example if its author was biased or it was produced under pressure. Practical checks:

Do the parts add up? In the CRLA end-of-year file, each grade and language has a number of learners assessed and a count at each of five reading levels. In all 38,679 schools, the five level counts add up to the number assessed. In a school’s own records, the same check applies to SF2 attendance against SF4 totals, or SF5 against SF6.

Are the values possible? In DepEd’s SY 2023-24 school files, 139 public schools report learners and no teachers, 267 report no classroom, 316 report more computers than learners, and one school reports 15,699 tablets. These are recording errors, not facts about the schools, and a study that used them unchecked would be wrong for those schools.

Does it agree with other records? 38,216 of the 38,679 CRLA schools (98.8%) match a school in DepEd’s SY 2023-24 school list by school ID; the other 463 cannot be linked without further checking. In a school, compare grades in the class record with SF9, or enrollment in SF1 with the LIS.

Is the author in a position to know, and free to report? Self-reported records, such as accomplishment reports, tend to show the school in a good light. Use them with records that are harder to shade, such as attendance counts.

Ethics in using documents

The toolkit’s three ethical practices:

  1. Proper permission. “Official permission should be secured for all documents that will be examined.” In a school, that is the school head’s written permission; for division records, the schools division office.
  2. Confidentiality. Keep the identities of those who produced the documents confidential; cite documents anonymously, use codes or pseudonyms, and store them securely. Learner Reference Numbers (LRNs), names and health data are personal information under the Data Privacy Act of 2012.
  3. Authenticity. Exclude “documents and materials from questionable sources and with doubtable content”.

Add a fourth: do not upload records with personal information to AI tools, which DO 003, s. 2026 prohibits. DepEd Action Research Ethics: Consent, Assent and Privacy covers consent and privacy in full.

Common mistakes

  • Using a retyped copy of a form instead of the system-generated record.
  • Mixing releases or school years without saying so.
  • Generalizing from a file that covers selected schools to all schools.
  • Trusting totals without checking the parts.
  • Copying learners’ names and LRNs into the research data. Replace them with codes.
  • Using records without the school head’s permission.

Frequently asked questions

What is document analysis in action research?

Using existing documents and materials, such as attendance records, report cards, test results, learners’ work and lesson plans, as data to answer a research question. DepEd’s Action Research Toolkit covers it in section 4.5.

What is the difference between external and internal criticism?

External criticism checks whether a document is genuine: who produced it, when, and whether it is the official version. Internal criticism checks whether its content is accurate and credible: whether the figures add up, are possible, and agree with other records.

Can I use school forms such as SF2 in my action research?

Yes, with the school head’s permission, and with learners’ names and LRNs replaced by codes. Attendance records (SF2 and SF4) and report cards (SF9) are among the most useful data for action research on attendance and achievement.

Are school records primary or secondary sources?

Primary. DepEd’s Action Research Toolkit lists official and unofficial school records of enrollment, retention, dropout and promotion, and report cards and grades, among primary sources.

More on DepEd research

Sources

Analysis by Mark Anthony Llego for NASH Reviewer. NASH Reviewer is not affiliated with DepEd.