Action Research Project for Reading

|(5 points) |demonstrates ample evidence |demonstrates evidence of |evidence of having read the |demonstrates no

Research, educational and action, are key to the continued improvement of educational methodologies and strategies. Educational research provides theories and pedagogy by organizing “empirical facts” (Johnson, 2012, p. 9). These scientific studies reach peer-reviewed conclusions that can be applied in multiple situations. Action research is more specific and focuses to provide a usable action plan (Johnson, 2012, p. 16).

This Literacy Case Study assesses the understanding and fluency of a fifth grade female student enrolled in one of Alaska’s rural village schools. The participant is an ELL student, with Yupik being her original language. I will discuss within this case study the participant, her prior assessment data, and the assessments I will administer, along with the results and the recommendations for the individual. Finally, I will reflect on both the participant and the professional practice I gained from this experience. This study is meant to analyze the literary progress of the participant at this moment in time, along with provide recommendations to assist in improving on the student’s progress and understanding.

I had the pleasure of interacting with some enthusiastic and energetic kindergarten students. My clinical educator, Ms. Hill, provided excellent professional feedback during my observation. She maintained that the assessment process is the core of instruction. East Elementary School is required to follow an assessment cycle that is designed by Iredell-Statesville School district officials. There are three test conducted at three different intervals: beginning, middle and end of year for both Reading and Math. Dibels is the most commonly used assessment tool for second grade. It is used in addition to Reading 3D for testing and progress monitoring purposes. Benchmark assessments are also used quarterly to measure academic growth in students.

Teaching in the middle, junior high, and senior high grades is a very complex task. As students progress from elementary to secondary, the demands of text dependent reading and writing to build content knowledge increase substantially. Thus, educators at this level are tasked with assisting their students in navigating new and diverse literacies. Since the inception of reading education in secondary schooling, a shifting focus has occurred from reading as remediation towards reading and writing as a developmental process that particularly strives towards building “discourse” knowledge and skills (Ruddle, 2008, p. 6-7). Yet, the complex terrain of secondary literacy is not siloed in academic factors alone, but rather, is influenced by the increasingly global and interconnected-ness that adolescent students bring into secondary school classrooms. New concerns, such as meeting the learning needs of immigrant students and the linguistic diversity that bring to the

Assessment: Students will use their literacy books to write an acitivty on their prediction, the visual clue that was most helpful to them in making the prediction and how their prediction varied from the text content.

This teacher friendly book focuses on what types of information common formative assessments can provide and how these assessments can provide timely data to help differentiate instruction (Ainsworth and Viegut, 5). What made this resource different was its “team” approach to assessment, which ties in nicely to my districts policies on assessment. The authors stress the importance of using data teams made up of professional learning communities, usually departments to create specifically designed assessments that address the same content by standard. The book also provided a very helpful revised instruction assessment model with data analysis which showed the steps of pre-assessment, analysis of results, differentiating instruction, teaching, monitoring, reflecting and adjusting, re-teaching and finally post assessment (Ainsworth & Viegut,

While my student is reading the assigned book, I will use the assessment chart above to assess the student learning. For instance, I will observe to see if my student is employing context clues to help her determining the meaning of words and phrases as they used in a text.

When I start taking the Research Methods for Educational Leaders course I did not have an idea about action research. During this course, I have learned how to implement a scientific based research to identify a problem and find effective solutions to a problem. At the beginning of the school year 2016 -2017, all 5th - 8th grade students took the Measures of Academic Progress Test (MAP), which creates a personalized assessment experience by adapting to each student's learning level. The MAP assessments measure growth and how students are progressing, because the data can be looked at historically and are consistent from season to season. Students can take the MAP assessments up to three times in a year in reading, science

Good morning, Lorin, I hope you had a lovely weekend and a good Thanksgiving. I wanted to ask you about rubrics. Is there a specific way to do them in terms of category, etc ...? Additionally, for the news report do the student's answers have to be based strictly on the image and the headline or can I ask them to use direct quotes. For example, the grade 11s watched 'O' would it be appropriate to ask them to use direct quotes from the movie, or is the whole purpose of a news article to come up with their own news article, without particular reference ?

Findings from this study revealed the following: all three participants were aware of the needs of their students relative to reading comprehension skills, the QAR strategy addresses the reading comprehension needs of third graders, and the QAR strategy is simple to learn and implement. They also agreed that the QAR strategy is effective for teaching students how to determine the questioning type and the location for the required answers and has positively impacted their student’s ability in answering questions beyond the knowledge level.

Student scores and marks on assessment tools will be entered into an electronic gradebook that is available for viewing by the teacher, student, and parent. Scores will be quantified into a grade of A – F each five weeks, culminating in a 20-week semester grade.

Reading has been considered a great source of knowledge for a very long time. Reading does not merely mean just reading what is written in the piece of paper but it is about understanding what has been written in order to develop knowledge. Furthermore, it is about exploring other people’s perspective and views and connecting it to our own. Both reading and writing are two essential skills in Sociology in order to study society and social behaviour.

Stringer’s (2007) action research model describes the look, think, and act process of action research. This model was used to design the proposed project. The look was discovered when several parents inquired about academic services at The Agency for their children as their children, because their children were academically performing below average at school. Parents asked for help with homework assignments or big projects or sometimes reported their child did not get his or her schoolwork done because of the child’s disruptive behaviors. Parents also stated they felt like they didn’t have the knowledge or skills level to help with the assignments. Staff

My unit is based on English Language Arts, Reading Literature for first grade learners (Lenz, Deshler, and Kissam, 2004). In this unit students are focusing on describing characters based on the New Jersey learning standard “RL.1.3 Describe characters, settings, and major event(s) in a story, using key details” (http://www.state.nj.us/education/cccs/2016/ela/crosswalk.pdf). Students learned about finding information about key details in a previous unit and describe settings and major events in the next unit. In order for students to have a better understanding of character development, three books were chosen; A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon, Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes, and Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon by Patty Lovell. The books