The use of action research in an in-service course to foster reflective practice in scoring student writing

Abstract

This paper describes an INSET (In-service Education for Teachers) course taught by the authors at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. This course taught two things: firstly, holistic and analytic methods for scoring student writing and secondly, how to carry out action research to evaluate the relative effectiveness of these two scoring methods. The first sections of the paper briefly describe the lingusitic commmunity of Brunei Darrusalam and provide some background on the emergence of action research as an investigative and evaluative tool for classroom teachers. The INSET course is described in terms of rationale, course objectives and participants and then the three parts of the course are outlined. A detailed evaluation of the course, guided by a set of research questions, is then presented. Concluding remarks reflect on the relative merits of including action research within such inservice courses.