Action Research Plan: Develop a Web-based Peer Feedback Process
Like many of my fellow students, one of the biggest takeaways from the course was realizing that I had unknowingly been doing “action research” for most of my teaching career, albeit in a loose and informal way. I had heard the term before, but I always mistook it for scholarly research rather than the practical investigation of a problem or particular observation. The course taught me a disciplined and systematic approach to identifying a problem (or focus) relevant to my specific teaching situation, refining that problem, collecting data about it, analyzing the data, and then developing an action plan to deal with the problem.
I liked the flow to this class, starting with writing a clear area of focus statement, which guided the development of the rest of my plan. From there, I developed my research questions, from which I built a literature matrix, a data matrix, a data analysis matrix, and a data collection instrument. Completing these tasks in this sequence made developing my action plan quite easy and, like other courses in my program, it showed how valuable planning can be in saving time later.
As part of the course, I wrote an action plan to develop a web-based, peer-review process. I will use my plan -- or some form of it -- in the future to promote peer reviews of EFL student writing. I believe this will greatly benefit my students for reasons stated in the plan (see artifact).
Action research benefits me and my students because it is personally relevant to me, my students, and (sometimes) my colleagues. It also has the potential to make an immediate impact or to reveal deeper and more complicated problems with a course or my instruction.