An Action Research Cycle in an Academic Skills Course

III. The Action Research Project

A pre-semester orientation was organized for the teachers of the new Academic Skills course in the spring of 1999. Progress meetings were held during the semester. Discussions with teachers led to the development of an introductory listening and note-taking module to introduce the skills to be taught in the course. At the end of the course, data was collected from an anonymous learner questionnaire as to student attitudes toward the course and to classroom activities. The results of this survey were later used to determine the relative difficulty of the videos and to sequence them appropriately.

After the course had finished, the teachers asked the 2 course developers to write a midterm and final test that could be used to determine a course mark for students in addition to teacher assessments of students in class and their completion of homework assignments. The course developers wrote a midterm and a final test. The two tests consisted of 2 different 20-minute lectures on the same subject and by the same lecturer. The questions on the tests required names and dates and short answer definitions as well as a sentence summarizing part of the lecture. The questions were the same as those asked during activities in the course and were representative of those described in the literature. They were intended as a direct test of student proficiency in listening and note-taking during a lecture.

An Action Research Cycle:
To monitor the subsequent development of the course, an action-research agenda was initiated with the 2 course developers and 3 of the 12 teachers in the fall semester. The questions posed in this preliminary action research cycle were (a)do students' listening and note-taking abilities improve after taking the course? (b)do students acquire greater confidence in listening to academic lectures?

The midterm and final tests for the course were used as a pre-test and a post-test to measure whether or not students listening and note-taking abilities improved as a result of taking the course. The researchers felt that they would have greater content validity than indirect measures of listening comprehension such as the listening comprehension tests on the TOEFL and TOEIC. In addition, to obtain qualitative data for the second research question, about student confidence after taking the course, an anonymous student "self-reflection" form was utilized that asked open-ended questions such as "What did you do in this class? What are you learning in this class? What is the best part of the class? What is the worst part of the class?" and included a 5-point self-assessment scale about the quality and quantity of the student's work.

In the spring semester of 2000, 1 course developer piloted the revised course, the introductory lesson, the testing instruments and the student response form. A review of student scores on the pre-test and post-test listening tests indicated that the two forms were of different degrees of difficulty. Changes were made to the wording of items on the 2 tests and a research plan was developed for the fall semester.

During the fall semester of 2000, 3 teachers each administered the pre-test, taught several 90-minute classes, then gave the post-test. The teachers administered the tests in three different conditions: (group 1)playing the entire lecture only once and without any pauses, (group 2)playing the lecture twice without any pauses, (group 3)playing the lecture twice, but stopping it at different points to allow the students to focus on one section at a time. In addition, each teacher gave the students in class 10 minutes at the end of the period to complete the self-reflection forms. Then the teacher collected them. Regardless of the testing condition and the short periods of instruction, (4 and ? hours for 2 classes and 3 and ? hours for 1 class), all three classes showed a significant gain in student scores at the .0001 level of significance (See Strong, Whittle, Cohen, Kringle, & Himbury, in press). Next, the 3 teachers reviewed the student comments on the self-reflection forms for general trends. These indicated that students felt more confident about their listening and note-taking abilities. One teacher reported that the students in his class commented that they could set themselves achievable objectives in improving their skills, that they also learned vocabulary and content knowledge from the videos and that they could use abbreviations and make summaries. Their opinions on the best point of the class included listening to native speakers using English, and discussing their notes with their partners in class. The students in all three classes also reported on the usefulness of the course in preparing them for future content lectures or seminars in English. Some of the worst points of the class, according to students were that they had so much to do and that the course started too early in the morning.

The most recent stage of the action research project was to run the experiment over an entire semester of some 12 classes and determine to determine the relative difficulty of the midterm and final tests.

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