Update on Action Research Plan

I began working on my action research plan in August of 2012.  I identified five students of low socioeconomic status from diverse backgrounds to assist in this project.  The students we ESL students with one of the students no longer receiving services from the ESL teacher, and two of the students being diagnosed with dyslexic tendencies.  We began by taking authentic writing samples from each student to use as a baseline for each student.  I rated the students writing based on their ability to communicate effectively by spelling, word choice, and subject/verb agreement.  The one of the two students with dyslexic tendencies rated lower than the other students by a substantial margin.  The rest of the students showed many struggle areas in communicating their ideas effectively in written form with exception of the student who was exited from the ESL program.

I setup my students with an account on My Big Campus.  We discussed how we were going to use this tool to help us in the classroom instead of paper/pencil for communicating.  We began using My Big Campus in September 2012.  The students began using My Big Campus to communicate their understanding of what we had learned in class.  When I gave the students a sentence stem to write from, they were not able to effectively enough for me to understand what they were trying to tell me.  I then reformatted the way that I assessed the students to short written answers with little room for them to elaborate.  I also posted idea stems on the discussion board for the students to respond to.  This stems were content based, but allowed the students to write about what they felt learned from the material covered in class.

In January, I took a midpoint writing assessment to see how the students were improving.  I was disappointed in the lack of grow demonstrated by the students at this point.  They had shown some improved spelling, but their word choice and subject/verb agreement was not improving at the same rate.  The students began using My big Campus after the January writing assessment.  I increased the amount of conversational writing and academic writing since the midpoint assessment.  I have spent forty-eight hours so far working on my action research plan.  I plan to spend another twenty to thirty hours to complete my project.