Teachers’ Motivations, Challenges and Difficulties in Action Research: A Narrative Study

The study aimed to develop an action research culture among schools in Tiaong District 1. Specifically, the study dealt with the number of research training attended, level of research training attended, number of researches conducted, and number of researches published; challenges encountered by the teachers in doing action research in terms of knowledge, schedule of workload, research resources, training related to action research; and the measures applied to address challenges in conducting action research. It employed a descriptive research method. The participants were 182 Junior High School teachers of Tiaong District 1 selected through complete enumeration. The self-made questionnaire was the main instrument used to gather data. The findings of the study revealed that most of the Junior High School teachers in Tiaong District 1 have only attended school level trainings and very few have attended national and international trainings. Moreover, most of the teachers do not have sufficient knowledge and skills in doing action research; and the major challenge that the teachers faced in doing action research was the schedule of workload that they preferred to spend their time teaching instead of doing action research. As the result implied the appropriate management of workload will aid the challenges in conducting action research as the Action Research Plan will serve as the basis for developing an action research culture among schools in Tiaong District 1.

This paper attempts to discuss Filipino pre-service teachers’ reflections on their self-efficacy beliefs when they conduct action research as a culminating requirement for their degree. The study traces and identifies patterns to see possible consistencies or inconsistencies of the level of self-competence among the participants, as revealed by their self-reflections. This qualitative research involves 10 participants who were asked to write seven reflective journals each as they went through the various stages of doing action research. Using constant comparison, the researchers arrived at three themes guided by self-efficacy theory. Results reveal that previous performance accomplishments, perceptions toward the people they collaborated with, and their positive and negative emotions toward their various action research experiences are the sources of their self-efficacy beliefs. The results are worthy of being considered in improving the pre-service teaching curriculum, particularly the thesis component to which action research writing is included.

This study examines English language teachers' beliefs about action research, their capacity to conduct it, and their actual implementation practices. It also aims to identify the disparities between the participants' beliefs and actual practices. Employing a case study design and a mixed-methods approach, the study focuses on Mettu town in Ethiopia and English teachers from three secondary schools within the town. A non-probability sampling method was used to select 31 teachers for participation. Data was collected through questionnaires and in-depth interviews. The findings reveal that the participants hold positive beliefs about action research, possess moderate competency in conducting action research, but exhibit very low levels of action research implementation. Despite their extensive teaching experience, advanced educational qualifications, and high professional status, their competency levels and action research practices fall short of expectations. These findings highlight the need for training, school-based motivation, resource availability, and reinforcement of Ethiopia's teacher development policies. The findings suggest that further research should attempt to explore the underlying contributing factors for the discrepancy between the English language teachers' beliefs and practices about action research.

The action research cycle reloaded: Conducting action research across buyer-supplier relationships

This descriptive research study was conducted to determine the self-efficacy of the public school teachers in conducting action research; their attitude towards action research and identify the possible factors that hindered teachers from doing action research & their influence level. The study was conducted in the different public schools in Magsaysay, Occidental Mindoro from May to July 2016. The public school teachers from the Department of Education-Magsaysay District were purposively selected as the respondents of the study. The study adopted and modified the Attitudes toward Research (ATR) scale and self-efficacy test to suit the needs of the research objectives. Descriptive statistics such as mean, frequency and percentage were used to describe and quantify the variables. The result shows that the public school teachers in Magsaysay, Occidental Mindoro have an "average" level of research self-efficacy. They tend to hold "positive" attitudes toward research. The "very high" influential factors that hindered teachers from doing action research were work over-load which leaves little time or no time for conducting research, lack of practical training/experience in how to do action research and lack of research centres and research specialist in school or division.

Action research is the philosophy and methodology of research generally applied in social science. As people are the central concern in social sciences and it becomes the duty of the social scientist to involve oneself with contemporary problems of people for improving their situation. Action research is a type of social science research that that aimsat creating a desirable change in the situation as a result of planned action intervention. It is carried out to identify areas of concern, develop and test alternatives, and experiment with new approaches.By conducting action research, researchers are able to make changes in order to improve the settings in which they conducted research, rather than just gathering data and formulating theories, as in conventional research. Considering the significance of action research in social science, it becomes important to have a comprehensive knowledge of it. Thus, the present paper has been prepared with the objective to review and explain the concept of action research in social sciences.

Action research in an organizational setting draws researchers and the employees involved into a joint process aimed at meeting both research and intervention objectives. The active collaboration of participants has major implications for researcher roles, and the manner in which these role shifts are carried out has a significant effect on study outcomes. Few have concretely analyzed the issues faced by researchers and organization members as they assume shared roles in the action research process. This article treats the relational aspect of researcher-participant co-investigation as a methodological issue. The authors share aspects of their experience in implementing an action research project aimed at understanding and reducing the deleterious effects of occupational stress. Relationships between researchers and organization members are dynamic. As they develop over time, role-related tensions and differences may arise around the issues of values and interests, resources and skills, control, political realities, and rewards and costs. Each of these is addressed, using examples from the authors' recently completed 6-year study. Further, the action research study participants helped revise this article and that process taught the authors much about these methodological issues.

This study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of training 13 EFL in-service teachers on incorporating action research with cognitive strategy instruction models to improve teaching EFL reading and writing instruction. The training focused on using two instructional models; the Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) for reading and the Self-Regulated Strategies Development (SRSD) for writing. A mixed methods research design was adopted for this study to allow triangulation of data and explore the multi-dimensional nature of the study variables. The participant teachers were engaged in conducting action research utilizing the cognitive strategy instruction. The teachers' action research reports and the school students' gains in writing and reading were analyzed and interpreted. Results demonstrated that the training was effective in developing teachers’ skills of developing and conducting action research and implementing CSI in their classroom practices. Results revealed that teachers prefer using SRSD over CSR. Additionally, students who were taught using SRSD achieved more learning gains rather than the students who were taught using CSR.

A study concerning the learning material salt hydrolysis, solubility and solubility product, as well as colloidal IA school in class XI PGRI 7 Banjarmasin. This study aims to develop teaching skills (pedagogy) via reflection, the teacher's role, cognitive and affective learning outcomes of students. Student teacher candidates will experience the transition from student to teacher. The researcher as a student teacher candidates recognize the need to form teacher competence (pedagogical, personal competence, social competence, professional competence) in the final period of the course. The establishment of these competencies do research through Action Research uses instructional strategies Numbered Heads Together (NHT) and improvement through self-reflection, aided by experienced teachers. This research method using action research design with 14 meeting. Each meeting consists of planning, action, observation and evaluation, and reflection. Subjects were high school students of class XI IA PGRI 7 Banjarmasin with the number 34. Data were collected through observation, reflection, questionnaires, and interviews. Data were analyzed with descriptive interpretive techniques. The results showed that the ability to teach researchers had better change based on data from the observer who observed since the beginning of the meeting until the last meeting learning lessons. Transition prospective student teachers become teachers in conducting action research can be used as one way to develop teaching skills. Keywords : NHT models, action research, reflection, salt hydrolysis, solubility and solubility product, colloids.

An action research study on improving students’ written production in French as a second language was initiated with the aim of solving the difficulties they en- counter while writing in French. The main goal of this research is to increase the literacy level and improve students’ writing skills in French. Descriptive statistics was used. The techniques used during the research are observation of the current state and monitoring the course of the research through the testing technique. The interview technique, through focus group discussions, was used before and after the conducted action research. The research findings indicate that the application of various interesting and unusual activities leads to positive results. The respondents confirmed they had significantly improved their writing skills in French by being actively engaged in this action research. The results also suggest that participants became more aware of mistakes they often made while writing in French either out of ignorance or insecurity. Students’ attention span and the amount of time they are willing to invest in doing an activity stand out as the key outcomes of the research. The insights into this action research could hopefully help many teachers ‒ edu- cational practitioners to raise the quality of their work so that its practical application in the teaching process is of greater importance.

This paper reports on an action research case study. The project involved nine classroom teachers using the action research process to develop an integrated curriculum algorithm and software classification system. The project also aimed to empower individual teachers with the knowledge, skill and confidence to understand, improve and transform their teaching procedures and practices with respect to the use of computers in primary classrooms. The discussion focuses on the development of the algorithm and the selection of a suite of software for the investigation of integrated curriculum topics. Also discussed is the impact of this type of instructional strategy on student and teacher motivation and performance. Also the lessons learnt in regard to software development, professional development, and the effectiveness of action research as a change agent.KeywordsClassroom TeacherAction Research ProjectAction Research ProcessPrimary ClassroomAction Research CycleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

High-school teaching in Japan is traditionally known as teacher-driven. To improve the situation, the new Course of Study for high schools, which will be fully implemented in 2022, emphasizes the importance of active learning and inquiry. This study examines the effectiveness of the use of action research and RTOP (Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol) for improving high-school physics lessons in Japan. Three action research sessions were conducted for a particular Basic Physics class in two months. The results indicate that the RTOP scores improved dramatically as action research progressed, especially in the areas of teacher’s procedural knowledge and student-student interactions. The teacher’s attitudes towards active learning and collaboration also showed an improvement. Discussions on the difficulties of helping teachers have student-centered views in physics teaching will be included in the presentation.

Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 The Nature of Educational Research Chapter 4 Action Research Chapter 5 Data Collection Methods Chapter 6 Data Analysis and Interpretation Chapter 7 Solving Problems and Taking Action Chapter 8 Evaluating Action Research Chapter 9 Conducting Action Research

Conducting action research is an excellent way for teachers and teacher trainers to pursue their professional development inside the classroom and for language learners to take part in small-scale research projects. This article presents a study where action research was used in the teaching and learning of English in a Norwegian upper-secondary school. A class of thirty, first-year Vg1 pupils took part in a project to investigate either lexico-grammatical or multimodal features in a selection of popular music while working towards achieving some of the competence aims in the English subject curriculum. The project involved dividing the learners into two groups each of which followed a different approach to investigating the lyrics and, in the case of one group, also the videos. The same written assignment was given to both groups to see if similar or diverging results emerged that might be related to the different approaches used. The learners were also given a pre-project and a post-project questionnaire to probe their thoughts and reactions to the learning process. Both approaches made use of music performances on YouTube; these represent a rich, multimodal language resource appreciated by adolescents but tending to be underexploited by English language teachers. Besides presenting the actual study, this article is intended as a step-by-step guide for teachers who would like to implement similar action in their own classrooms.

Research in the fields of second-language acquisition and education has supported the value of written reflection, but scant research has explored how other types of reflection may come into play when learners employ strategies and produce oral language. This paper reports findings from an action research study that focused on integrating individual oral reflection using digital recorders to facilitate 18 graduate-level English-as-an-additionallanguage (EAL) students’ learning of academic speaking skills. The qualitative and quantitative results provide important empirical information about what strategies graduate students used, the relationships between the learners’ strategic behaviours and oral performance, and differences in the quality of reflection between advanced and nonadvanced proficiency learners. The study’s findings indicate that weekly spoken reflection functions as a mediational tool that learners can use to deal with their language-learningrelated thoughts and emotions, which have important implications because of the online nature of speaking. In addition to generating empirical knowledge about a modality of reflection that has direct pedagogical implications, the paper includes a personal reflection on the challenges involved in conducting action research, for the purpose of inviting further dialogue and reflection among action researchers.