What now?

I have had a hard time sticking with my plan. I have a student teacher this semester and it has been hard for me to carry out the things that I wanted to do. I was going to use last years EOC data from 6th grade to help identify students that need more support. However, one of the 6th grade teachers did not enter the test into the data bank. So I only have about half of my kids test scores. I feel very overwhelmed with the internship and the classes. I have no free time to get anything done. So I'm going to have to rethink my plan.

Changing the plan

I have had three people that I highly respect tell me that I need to be more specific with my action research plan. That my topic is to broad and that it will be easier to do if I narrow it down to one sub group of the eco-dis population. So stay tuned I will be narrowing my focus.

That was not user friendly-So let me try again.

Goal is to reduce the achievement gap for economically disadvantaged students.

How:
1. Call or make direct contact with the eco-dis parents by the end of the 6 weeks
2. Assign peer tutors to the ones that failed the end of course exam last year
3. Discuss science vocabulary and use more visuals with the vocabulary
4. Use more differentiated strategies to make learning more meaningful to the students.

my site supervisor wants me to add
5. Student survey to see what areas the eco-dis feel are their weekest and how they like to learn

Plan to reduce the gap for economically disadvantaged students

Taking action for school improvement:
The plan that I have formatted has 4 steps. First, I would like to call the parents of the economically disadvantaged students in the first six weeks of the school year. Parent participation is an important factor in student learning. To accomplish this I will need to make a list of the students that I have that are economically disadvantaged and their phone numbers. I will monitor and evaluate this step each six weeks by the amount of contact that I have with economically disadvantaged students compared to my non-economically disadvantaged students. Second, I will assign students who failed the previous year’s end of course exam a peer tutor and require them to meet with their tutor once a week. I will need a list of student who did not pass the sixth grade end of course exam and I will need a list of National Junior High Society members who are willing to tutor. I will need to have times set up for them to meet their tutor and work. I will evaluate to see if this is working by keeping track of the time that the students worked together and by looking at the quizzes and unit test scores. Third, I plan to use nonlinguistic representation of vocabulary words to increase their background knowledge in science. I will need a list of vocabulary for each unit that I teach and several different vocabulary strategies to keep students engaged. I will monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the increased vocabulary by looking at quiz grades and unit test scores. At the end of the year I will compare the results of the 6th grade end of course with the results of the 7th grade end of course exams. Forth, I will differentiate instruction by learning styles for my students. Each student will be quizzed to determine their learning style and from that point the students will pick activities to do from their learning styles. I will need to differentiate each unit of study, and I will need to find good multiple intelligence surveys for them to complete. I will evaluate this by orally quizzing the students on topics and by looking at the unit and end of course exams comparing them to the previous year’s exams.

Eco-Dis Students

After looking at TAKS data for my school the girls have almost closed the gap. They were only down by 2 percentage points. So I nix that idea and decided to look at why the eco dis students are so far behind and what strategies that I can use to improve their scores. The eco dis score was 79% where the non eco dis score was 90% on the Science TAKS. If you know of any resources to look at let me know. So I start my journey as an action researcher.

How Educators might use blogs

Educators might use blogs to share their research or to journal ideas. In sharing their research they get the perspective of other people. When people collaborate on an issue it allows for the educators to process and come up with new ideas. The journaling allows for thoughts to be revisited over time and to reflect on ideas from the past.

What is Action Research?

Action research is a continuous study of issues within a school, ranging from teaching strategies to improvement on test scores. There are four parts to doing action research:

1. Define an issue to study. This tends to be a hard step for most people because they need to make sure the focus of the research pinpoints the area of concern.

2. Review professional literature about the issue. This step is about not re-inventing the wheel. Somewhere out there someone has had to deal with the same issue. Look to see how they handled the problem to get new ideas.

3. Design an action plan about the issue. Look at everything that has been done before and customize it for your school. Make sure the plan is something that actually can be accomplished.

4. Implement the action plan and share the results. Reflecting on the results of the action plan is very important to see if the plan worked. Sharing of the plan allows for collaboration and learning from peers. From this point the administrator can reevaluate to see their next step in the improvement process.

In my research I will be focusing on the gap between boys and girls in science standardized test scores. What strategies need to be implemented to increase the girl’s scores on standardized tests while keeping the boys scores high?

Will start soon

I'm not quite ready to start but I will soon.