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. The course had two main aims: to introduce holistic and analytic methods for scoring student writing and to train teachers to conduct action research to evaluate the effectiveness of these methods. The paper outlines the linguistic context of Brunei, the rationale, objectives and structure of the course, and presents an evaluation based on research questions. The findings indicate that incorporating action research into in-service training can enhance teachers’ understanding of assessment practices, support reflective teaching, and enable the practical implementation and evaluation of different scoring approaches. Concluding remarks discuss the benefits of integrating action research into professional development courses.